14 DAY TRIAL // 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 3.11.2.
Orca 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.
It's been a long time coming, but the developers are finally starting to make some big modifications to Orca. The complete extent of this overhaul will be visible in the upcoming GNOME 3.12.
“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 3.11.2:
• Two hangs in Firefox have been corrected; • Orca has been stopped from repeating the end of an autocompleted address in Thunderbird; • The alert presentation for Thunderbird and Firefox has been improved; • The "list of" dialog for ARIA landmarks has been implemented; • The text-changed events from Thunderbird's status bar are now ignored; • Focus grabs are no longer applicable when the user is setting the caret position; • Orca has been prevented from announcing "misspelled" with each key press; • The structural navigation for tables in LibreOffice Writer has been fixed; • "Has formula" is now said when a Calc cell with a formula gains focus.
A complete backlog of updates and bug fixes can be found in the GNOME repository. Download Orca 3.11.2 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.