A new development version of Orca can be downloaded from Softpedia

Feb 6, 2014 15:26 GMT  ·  By

Orca, a free, open source, flexible, and extensible screen reader that provides access to the graphical desktop via speech and refreshable Braille, is now at version 3.11.5.

It works with applications and toolkits that support the Assistive Technology Service Provider Interface (AT-SPI), which is the primary assistive technology infrastructure for Linux and Solaris.

Orca is going through a major overhaul, and there is a lot of work being done, with multiple new features and changes implemented between versions.

“This cycle, Orca is getting an overhaul with much of the code being rewritten in preparation for the focus: event deprecation. I am also taking this opportunity to remove hacks and improve Orca's performance.

“While every effort is being made to ensure no regressions are introduced, please remember that 3.11.x is unstable. If you find a bug present only in 3.11.x, please report it on the Orca list.” said one of the developers.

Highlights of Orca 3.11.5:

• Several braille panning issues have been fixed; • Several issues with presentation of dynamic headers Gecko have been fixed; • The changes in the Firefox find toolbar hierarchy and events are now handled properly; • A couple of bugs related to presenting a new ARIA alert or dialog have been fixed; • Only treat properly-marked up ARIA live regions as live regions; • The default updateBraille() is now used for ARIA widgets in Gecko content; • A custom script has been created for Epiphany to better handle window activation and deactivation; • Quite a few “chattiness” issues have been corrected; • Duplicated strings from Braille have been removed; • Orca's support for gnome-search-tool has been rewritten.

A complete backlog of updates and bug fixes can be found in the GNOME repository. Download Orca 3.11.5 right now from Softpedia.

Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.