Orca, the popular screen reader, and magnifier for Linux, has entered development in anticipation of the public launch of version 3.24 on March 23rd.
Version 3.23.4 is available now for testing, if you would like to get a head start on the new release. You can download it here.
Some of the improvements include:
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Better support for webpages
Improved ARIA support
Improved support for the LibreOffice office suite
Improvements in handling the SeaMonkey mail client
Here is the complete change log.
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Optionally announce when entering and leaving blockquotes, lists, tables, panels, forms, and landmarks
Improve handling of pages where the content is rapidly and repeatedly destroyed and replaced
Improve workarounds for several Gecko editable-text bugs
Ensure we always announce ARIA landmark type before setting the caret
Improve presentation of ARIA regions
Add custom support for ARIA switch role
Present messages resulting from use of aria-invalid
Check for and filter out defunct objects when building elements list
Eliminate double-speaking of line after document load
Suppress presentation of irrelevant loading messages resulting from busy state-change events in SeaMonkey’s mail client
Eliminate double-speaking of inferred labels in SayAll
Fix several instances where new document name was not being presented
Handle (un)ordered lists in which item text falls outside the item element
Descend images if they are imagemaps so that we don’t fail to present their content
LibreOffice:
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Fix crash presenting certain Writer tables
Handle LO’s recently-corrected exposure of text attributes for spellcheck
Handle change in LO’s accessibility tree for dialogs
Handle more cases of LO objects becoming defunct
Don’t assume we can always get a string value for Calc input line
Yet another workaround for yet another missing state-changed event
General:
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Make spoken presentation of accessible description optional
Work around missing focus-change events when focus changes due to a mouse click
Use Unicode in translatable strings
Fix several issues in which we incorrectly update our location based on bogus or redundant accessibility events
Reduce chattiness associated with presentation of typeahead search
Include infobar content when presenting status bar and default button
Reduce chattiness associated with icons which incorrectly implement accessible text
Improve presentation of editable comboboxes
Fix bug in which Orca is silent on launch due to inability to access default screen
Don’t generate substring content unnecessarily (performance)
Don’t treat an empty table as layout only if the user gives it focus
Fix bug speaking punctuation when punctuation style is set to NONE
Stop converting horizontal ellipses to “…” in braille
New and updated translations:
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Czech
German
Spanish
French
Galician
Hungarian
Dutch
Polish
Brazilian Portuguese