14 DAY TRIAL // The Orca open-source screen reader and magnifier utility used by default in many GNU/Linux distributions, especially those running the GNOME desktop environment, has recently received a major update.
The fact of the matter is that we're talking about Orca 3.22, which is currently under massive development as part of the upcoming GNOME 3.22 desktop environment, due for release on September 21, 2016. In case you didn't know, Beta 2 milestone was pushed to public testers a few days ago.
As usual, we've managed to get our hands on the internal changelog, and to our surprise, there's a huge list of changes added in Orca 3.22, such as performance improvements when building context, the ability to automatically refresh content, and toolkit-specific handling for special cases to the Flat Review area.
Moreover, for the Mouse Review area, Orca 3.22 brings more GTK+ 3 compatibility, better fetching of page tab list descendants, improved reading of text with embedded objects, handling of windows that contain accessible names that do not match the displayed name, and some other minor fixes.
LibreOffice and Terminal improvements
The list of changes implemented in Orca 3.22 continues with handling for GtkListBox items in the LibreOffice office suite, workarounds for various LibreOffice bugs that made Orca present wrong things, along with better handling of paragraphs in read-only documents.
For the Terminal, Orca 3.22 updates some cached information, reduces chattiness by attempting to filter out terminal pager text-change noise, no longer ignores deletion events that result from the BackSpace key, adds various workarounds for better VTE support, and presents terminal paste events the same way it does for other apps.
Last but not least, Orca 3.22 will add many Web improvements, such as a new "sticky" browse mode and keybinding, new localized role names for ARIA landmark roles, better reading of the list of messages from Roundcube Mail, and much more. Download Orca 3.22 Beta 2 right now via our website, but please try to keep in mind that this is a pre-release version, which might contain unknown issues.