14 DAY TRIAL // The GNOME 3.17.3 desktop environment, a milestone towards GNOME 3.18, will be released in the coming days and will include major updates to some of the most essential core components, including the Orca open-source screen reader and magnifier.
Orca 3.17.3 has been announced and it is a great release that fixes various issues in the live region support in order to make Google Docs usable under the application, implements a "web" script that can be used for Gecko content, and addresses various issues related to the Gecko engine when using the ROLE_TEXT function for static text elements.
Moreover, Orca's structural navigation support has been rewritten in order to patch some annoying bugs, as well as to improve its overall performance, the performance of event flood and dead accessible has been enhanced, the display of newly-misspelled words in the LibreOffice Writer app has been repaired, and unbound keybindings have been implemented to support increase and decrease of speech volume.
Orca 3.17.3 is distributed as part of GNOME 3.17.3
In addition to the changes mentioned above, the third milestone of the upcoming Orca 3.18 open-source screen reader and magnifier now displays the text of ROLE_FOOTER objects, makes sure that the user does not navigate into tooltip-like popups when dealing with Web Apps, and falls back on parent autocomplete each time an entry is missing a name and a label.
Last but not least, the Spanish and Greek language translations have been updated in Orca 3.17.3, which is a pre-release software that contains known issues, so we don't recommend installing it on production environments where stability is of the essence. Orca 3.17.3 is distributed as part of the GNOME 3.17.3 desktop environment, which should be released soon. In the meantime, you can download the Orca 3.17.3 sources right now from Softpedia.