Orca 3.19.2 is now available for download and testing

Nov 27, 2015 01:35 GMT  ·  By

We've mentioned in previous GNOME-related articles written right here on Softpedia that the GNOME developers are working around the clock these days to unleash the second development milestone towards the GNOME 3.20 desktop environment.

What this means is that they're updating more and more GNOME core apps to version 3.19.2, including the popular and extremely useful Orca screen reader and magnifier, which has just received a huge amount of new features and improvements.

Looking at the attached changelog, we can notice that Orca 3.19.2 implements new commands and settings, among which we can mention unbound commands for presenting details about selected link or text, and support for using color names.

Moreover, a graphical user interface has been added for enabling fast-forward, rewind and structural navigation in the "Say All" function, and the braille and speech message settings have been updated to be configurable by the end user via the application's GUI.

Another interesting feature is that Orca can now speak numbers as digits, thanks to the implementation of preference and unbound keybinding. Additionally, the printable-keys keyecho feature has been split into numeric, punctuation, and alpha.

Among other features added in Orca 3.19.2, we can mention support for a 12-hour time format (with seconds), great improvements to the reading of Twitter timeline items (tweets), fixes for Thunderbird- and Gecko-related bugs, and ARIA 1.1 compliance.

Numerous issues have been resolved

In addition to the changes mentioned above, Orca 3.19.2 comes with GtkInfoBars support, GtkEntryCompletion improvements, and better GtkListBox support. Numerous issues reported by users since the previous development milestone have been fixed, making Orca more reliable and stable.

The Portuguese, Czech, Spanish, and German translations have been updated. You can download the Orca 3.19.2 sources right now from Softpedia or wait for the GNOME 3.19.2 to appear in the default software repositories of your GNU/Linux distribution. Please do not install this pre-release version in production environments.

Orca 3.19.2 Changelog