14 DAY TRIAL // The controversial, modern and acclaimed GNOME desktop environment will get a major release this spring, on March 25, 2015, which will include numerous new features, updated core components and applications, as well as a large amount of bugfixes and updated translations.
Today, we announce the second Beta release of the Orca application, an open-source GNOME utility that provides users with a flexible and extensible screen reader and magnifier tools. It is known as the number one accessibility tool for GNOME and other GNOME-based desktops, including Ubuntu’s Unity interface.
According to the raw changelog, Orca 3.16 Beta 2 adds support for XDG_VTNR for Braille, it no longer relies on the pyatspi's cache for names, adds some optional start and end offset arguments for getTextLineAtCaret(), validates reportedly-selected children, and introduces support for Evolution's graphical user interface (GUI).
Moreover, this Beta update repairs several issues related to presentation of web content and widgets, adds workarounds for two inactive LibreOffice accessible objects, removes the clickCount function from orca_state.py, moves lastKeyEchoTime to speechdispatcherfactory.py, and no longer takes the text insertions from menu items and menus into consideration.
The application received better support for Evolution
We’ve also noticed that Orca 3.16 Beta 2 brings better support for the Evolution groupware and email client, such as support for identifying and presenting Evolution's Status column header, support for setting the default value of sayAllOnLoad to false, support for handling missing events from a questionable object in the Evolution’s GUI, the addition of utility methods for identifying WebKitGtk content in Evolution, and support for handling dead accessibles.
Last but not least, this second Beta update for Orca 3.16 introduces formatting strings for the ROLE_LABEL functions in order for them to be presented, implements a new function that allows the use of structural navigation commands during “SayAll,” and addresses a bug in the "not selected" presentation of Evolution’s Messages tree.
As expected, many language translations have been updated in the second Beta release of Orca 3.16, including German, Spanish, French, Galician, Lithuanian, Slovenian, Traditional Chinese (Taiwan), and Norwegian bokmal. Download Orca 3.16 Beta 2 right now from Softpedia, but keep in mind that it’s an unstable software and it shouldn't be used on production machines.