Orca 2.18.0 Release Notes
NEW FEATURES:
- Much work with Firefox 3. We're getting closer each day. NOTE to users: the AT-SPI implementation of Firefox 3 is substantially different from that in Firefox 2. Furthermore, Firefox 3 has not been officially released yet and we all are still working away at improving the access to it via Orca. Please be patient and please work with us to help improve the implementation in Firefox.
- Much work with Thunderbird 3. NOTE to users: we still suggest using Evolution at this time. As with Firefox, we are continually working with the Mozilla team to improve access to Thunderbird.
- Continued work on Open Office. This includes the following:
- Much improved table navigation
- Support for dynamic row and column headings (Insert+r and Insert+c)
- Improved reading of text attributes (Insert+f)
- Better support to announce when the user activates a toggle button to change font attributes
- New script for acroread to provide some level of access to PDF documents. NOTE to users: we've also notified the Adobe team of various issues with access to acroread and they are looking at the problems.
Better support for system administration applications. Much of this was work that was done outside of Orca and still requires some action on the part of the end user. We will keep the Orca WIKI up-to-date as much as possible to provide instructions on what is necessary.
- Better support for accessible installs and logins. This includes the following:
- Support to allow the use of braille, speech, and magnification to be specified from the command line
- Eliminating the requirement to have a writable home directory to run Orca.
- Also related is the ability to specify an alternate .orca location via the -u and --user-prefs-dir command line options.
- Support for viewing and modifying the Orca keybindings from the preferences dialog. Many thanks to Jorge Sandín from El Sendero for this contribution and Juan Ramon Jimenez from ONCE for his subsequent improvements. This includes the ability to switch between desktop and laptop keybindings as well as the ability to use the Caps Lock key as the Orca modifier.
- Support for the "Find" command (keypad "delete").
- Support for the "Where am I" command (various combinations of keypad "enter", the Insert key and single/double taps provide different levels of information).
- Support for application-specific settings.
- Support for phonetic/military spelling (triple tap on keypad 5).
- Improved text attribute access (Insert+f).
- Support for repeated character count.
- Support for presenting results when finding files.
- Better support for announcing "newline" and blank lines.
- Support for a custom pronunciation dictionary.
- Provide at least some level of notification when the laptop battery status changes. NOTE to users: this is a workaround while accessibility issues in the Galago notification daemon are being resolved.
- Better handling of autocompletion text areas.
- Improved support for the Java platform.
- Improved support for liferea. Many thanks to Francisco Javier Dorado Martínez from ONCE for this contribution.
- Improved support for gnome-system-monitor.
- Improved support for gnome-mag magnification.
- Improved support for gcalctool.
- Added Orca man page.
- New and improved regression test harness.
- New Orca main window and quit dialog. Also added "Apply" button to the preferences dialog.
- Support for BrlTTY v3.8.
IMPORTANT BUG FIXES:
- Better support for UTF-8 strings.
- Support to expose the language attribute of the speech synthesis engine.
- Better support to handle crash dialogs from other applications.
- Prevent informational queries of Orca (e.g., "orca --help") from causing an existing orca process to quit.
- Prevent slow downs in the gedit Print Dialog.
- Eliminate sluggishness when navigating tables in Open Office.
- Eliminate stack traces under special flat review circumstances.
- Better support for handling duplicate window titles when moving between them using Alt+Tab. A similar fix was also made to handle navigating between labels that have the same name.
- Support the pan buttons on the braille display in learn mode.
- Support more voices under the emacspeak support for outloud. Many thanks to Bart Bunting for his contributions to this.
