14 DAY TRIAL // As part of the soon-to-be-released RC (Release Candidate) build of the anticipated GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, the developers behind the popular Orca screen reader and magnifier applications have announced a new version.
Orca 3.18 RC (Release Candidate) is now available for download and adds a great number of new features, among which we can mention support for aria-roledescription, a workaround for missing object:state-changed:focused events from the Gecko engine, as well as fixes for compatibility with various Gecko content.
Furthermore, there's a fix for an issue that caused the application to skip nested iframe content during the SayAll feature, support for handling tracebacks that appear after a crash of the LibreOffice Calc component, and support for deregistering keystroke listeners before closing the app.
The Release Candidate build of Orca 3.18 also adds the ability to ignore state-changed:busy events, which appear during printing operations in the Mozilla Thunderbird email and news client, and removes bogus positive identifying of the spellcheck dialog of Mozilla Thunderbird.
The notification-daemon script received Braille output support
In addition to the many new features mentioned above, Orca 3.18 Release Candidate (RC) addresses a performance issue that occurred as a result of the appearance of dialogs that contain multiple widgets, and adds support for saving messages and Braille output to the notification daemon. Last but not least, the German and French language translations have been updated.
Those of you who want to test this new unstable snapshot of the Orca software can download the Orca 3.18 Release Candidate build right now from Softpedia. However, please try to keep in mind that this is a pre-release version and it is not suitable for deployment on production environments. Orca 3.18 will be distributed along with the GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, due for release next week, on September 23, 2015.