Orca 3.23.4 is now available for public testing

Feb 6, 2017 23:22 GMT  ·  By

It's been a while since we last talked here about the Orca open-source screen reader and magnifier, and it looks like its developers are finally preparing to unleash the next major release for the upcoming GNOME 3.24 desktop environment.

Orca 3.24 has entered development recently, and a first preview, versioned 3.23.4, is now ready for public testing for those of you who want to get an early taste of what's coming in the final release of the application, which will launch this spring on March 23, as part of the GNOME 3.24 Stack.

There are numerous improvements implemented so far in the Orca 3.23.4 snapshot, and among those that caught our attention, we can mention better support for handling web pages whose content is constantly and quickly replaced, the introduction of custom support for ARIA switch role, along with improvements to how ARIA regions are displayed.

Orca's support for the LibreOffice office suite was improved as well, and Orca 3.23.4 ships with the ability to handle changes in LibreOffice's accessibility tree for dialogs, support for handling more cases of LibreOffice objects that expire, as well as support for handling LibreOffice's revamped exposure of text attributes for built-in spellchecker.

Unicode is now used in translatable strings

There are many bugs that have been fixed in this first pre-release version, which means that Orca 3.24 will get a major performance boost. Unicode is now used in translatable strings, SeaMonkey's mail client has also received some improvements, and presentation of editable comboboxes should work much better now.

Below, we've attached the full changelog for the Orca 3.23.4 development release, just in case you're curious to know what exactly has been fixed, and we invite you to download the source tarball right now from our website if you want to test drive the upcoming application on your favorite Linux-based operating system. Happy testing!

Orca 3.23.4 Changelog