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Announcing Orca v2.21.4
WOW! THE TEAM HAS BEEN BUSY FOR THIS RELEASE!!! Changes have been made in the areas of magnification, Firefox, and performance in addition to keeping up with our aggressive addressing of bugs and quality. Many thanks to all Orca contributors for their hard work this release. =============== * What is Orca? =============== Orca is a free, open source, flexible, and extensible screen reader that provides access to the graphical desktop via user-customizable combinations of speech, braille, and/or magnification. Orca development has been led by the Sun Microsystems, Inc., Accessibility Program Office via continued engagement with its end users and generous contributions from wonderful community members. The Orca v2.21.4 release is targeted for the GNOME v2.21.4 development release and requires the latest at-spi/pyatspi from GNOME v2.21.4. You can also read more about Orca at http://live.gnome.org/Orca. ================================== * What's changed for Orca v2.21.4? ================================== 2.21.4 - 17-Dec-2007 Magnification: * Support "live updating" when setting various magnification features Changes made to the zoomer in the Orca Preferences now update in real time: it is no longer necessary to press the Apply button to see if the option you've chosen works for you and then undo it or adjust it if it doesn't. Note that you must still press the Apply or the OK button to make your changes permanent. * Bug #452316 - should have a "fullscreen" checkbox We've added a Position combo box so that it's easy to select the position of the zoomer. The options are full screen, left half, right half, top half, bottom half, and custom. Choosing custom allows you to specify the location of each edge of the zoomer. The new default zoomer position is full screen if full screen magnification is possible. Otherwise, the right half of the screen will be used by default. * Bug #463881 - Evaluate other gnome-mag features for inclusion in Orca prefs You can now adjust the brightness and contrast levels and use the colorblind filters from libcolorblind. Basic brightness and contrast levels can be adjusted through the spin buttons on the Magnifier pane of the Orca Preferences dialog. If you press the Advanced Settings button at the bottom of that pane, you'll be placed in a dialog box where you can customize the red, green, and blue brightness levels and contrast levels individually. The Advanced Settings dialog is also where you can choose a color filter. These options should enable you to create the color scheme that works best for you. Note that in order for colorblind filtering to work, you must install libcolorblind and then re-build gnome-mag. You can also add a border to your zoomer to help separate it from the non-magnified area. The border size and color are customizable. We've also separated the cursor color from the cross-hair color so you no longer have to find the one color that works best for both. * Bug #464705 - Provide option to keep caret in center of magnifier region of interest We've added individual tracking and alignment settings for controls and the text cursor: each can have an alignment of centered or push (move the magnifier window the least). In addition, you can now specify an edge margin for the text cursor. This margin is how close the caret should be allowed to get to the edge of the screen before it's time to "push." The margin can range from 0 to 50%, with 50% being the equivalent of choosing centering. These options should make it easier to keep track of your location on the screen and ensure that you can always see the area around your point of focus. * Bug #501414 - Orca should have (unbound) keybindings for quickly changing magnification settings We've added the following new commands: - Toggle color enhancements - Toggle mouse enhancements - Increase magnification level - Decrease magnification level - Cycle to the next magnifier position - Toggle magnifier on/off These should help you quickly change the zoomer to best access what you're working on. These commands are "unbound," meaning they do not have a keystroke assigned to them. You can define the keystrokes you would like to use on the Key Bindings pane of the Orca Preferences dialog: locate each command you wish to define a keystroke for, move to the Key Binding column, and press Return. You'll be prompted for the new key. Press it (rather than type it out) and then press Return. Note that these commands do not permanently change the settings; they merely alter them "on the fly." * Bug #503965 - Orca should provide support for the pointer following focus and the zoomer If you're using the keyboard to perform a task and then move the mouse pointer, the zoomer would move away from your task and to the location of the mouse pointer. We've added two options for dealing with this: - Pointer follows zoomer (enabled by default): If the mouse pointer is not on the screen when you initially move the mouse, it will be moved into the zoomer so that you can continue to see what you were working on. If your preferred mouse tracking mode is centered, the pointer will be moved to the center; otherwise it will be moved to the item with focus. - Pointer follows focus (disabled by default): If this option is enabled, the mouse pointer will follow you as you arrow through menu items and move among controls in dialog boxes. We also know we have more work to do and are tracking the work with these bugs: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=464734 Provide some kind of visual feedback for the item with focus http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=504075 Orca should provide support for smooth/linear panning of the zoomer http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=504077 Orca should support mouse bindings Please also check http://live.gnome.org/Orca/Magnification and http://live.gnome.org/Orca/ConfigurationGui for more information in the coming days. We're planning updates to them soon to match the work above. Firefox: * Fix for bug #451988 - Firefox: navigation by landmark The XHTML role attribute module defines the following roles: banner, contentinfo, definition, main, navigation, note, search, secondary, seealso. New functionality in Orca allows you to navigate to the next and previous landmark on a page via the unbound keybindings: - Goes to previous landmark - Goes to next landmark These commands are "unbound," meaning they do not have a keystroke assigned to them. You can define the keystrokes you would like to use on the Key Bindings pane of the Orca Preferences dialog: locate each command you wish to define a keystroke for, move to the Key Binding column, and press Return. You'll be prompted for the new key. Press it (rather than type it out) and then press Return. * Fix for bug #466251 - Support ARIA live regions in Firefox/Gecko. http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/AJAX:WAI_ARIA_Live_R... Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) has recently received a great amount of attention, and the number of websites using or planning to use the technique is increasing. AJAX enables web developers to easily create sites that change areas of their content in response to user actions (such as in webmail applications) or real world changes (such as updates of stock prices). http://www.w3.org/TR/aria-state/ is designed to address these issues. Live region markup allows web page authors to specify when and how live changes to specific areas of a web page should be spoken or shown on a Braille display by a screen reader. The support for live regions in Orca is exposed via these keybindings: r and Shift+r: go to the next and previous live region relative to the current caret position y: go to the last (or current) live region that spoke \: cycle through the different levels of politeness Shift+\: turn monitoring of live regions on and off Orca+F1, Orca+F2, ..., Orca+F9: review the last nth live region announcement, where n is the number of the function key (i.e., the last announcement is obtained via Orca+F1, the 9th last announcement is obtained via Orca+F9). * Fix for bug #473009 - Cannot arrow to the end of an HTML entry if Orca is controlling the caret * Fix for bug #501447 - Orca sometimes fails to speak our location when entering FF3 entries Performance and Quality: * Much work on performance (bug #491756). If you have specific areas that you think are slow, please let us know the exact details. These performance fixes also rely upon fixes being made in other modules (pyorbit, pyatspi) for the GNOME 2.21.4 release. * Completed major pylinting work (bug #486726). This helped us greatly and found a few latent bugs. General: * Fix for bug #486970 - Where Am I should let you know you are in a toolbar * Fix for bug #496846 - When tabbing to an editable combobox, text selection should be displayed in braille * Fix for bug #503527 - Mnemonics are not supported well New and updated translations (THANKS EVERYONE!!!): es Spanish Francisco Javier Dorado Martinez and Jorge Gonzalez ko Korean Changwoo Ryu nb Norwegian Bokmã¥L Espes Stefansen and Kjartan Maraas sl Slovenian Matej UrbanÄ?iÄ? ====================== * Where can I get it ? ====================== You can obtain Orca v2.21.4 in source code form at the following: http://download.gnome.org/sources/orca/2.21/orca-2.21.4.t... http://download.gnome.org/sources/orca/2.21/orca-2.21.4.t... Enjoy! The Orca Team _______________________________________________ gnome-announce-list mailing list gnome-announce-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-announce-list (Log in to post comments)
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