Announcing Orca v2.27.2

===============
* 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 the Mozilla Foundation and wonderful community members.

You can also read more about Orca at http://live.gnome.org/Orca.

==================================
* What's changed for Orca v2.27.2?
==================================

2.27.2 - 25-May-2009

General:

* Work on bug #354471 - Text selection from braille input device.
   This is the first step of implementing this feature.  Here's the
   behavior:

   KEY_CMD_CUTBEGIN (Dot 1 + cursor routing key on my display) -
   this will specify the start of a selection.  Orca will merely
   move the caret to the given spot and will clear any existing
   selection.

   KEY_CMD_CUTLINE (Dot 4 + cursor routing key on my display) -
   this will specify the end of a selection and the selected text
   is automatically copied to the system clipboard.  If a selection
   doesn't exist, Orca creates a new one where the other endpoint
   of the selection is where the caret is.  If a selection exists
   and the selection point is outside the existing selection, Orca
   extends the existing one.  If a selection exists and the
   selection point is inside the existing selection, Orca trims the
   selection from the right (i.e., the selected text that's after
   the selection point becomes unselected).

   Known issues that need to be resolved:

   1) This only works in text areas.  It doesn't work across things
      such as paragraphs in OpenOffice.

   2) There's some strangeness with speech feedback: it sometimes
      says "unselected" when the text is selected.  This should be
      fixable, but there also probably shouldn't be any speech
      feedback when doing this from the braille display.

* Fix for bug #466841 - Orca doesn't announce items when Alt+Tabbing
   if Compiz is enabled. This fix is designed to improve Orca's access
   to the basic window switcher in Compiz. There are still bugs in
   Compiz which make providing compelling access difficult, but this
   should at least make switching windows accessible.

* Fix for bug #511468 - Ekiga chat window accessibility problem.

* Fix for bug #574221 - left-pane in Ekiga's preference box can't be
   read at start-up.

* Fix for bug #575614 - Please add speakable characters: ? and ?.

* Fix for bug #577977 - provide speech feedback for "repeat last find"
   in Gedit.

* Fix for bug #581372 - Move cursor routing and six dot key handling
   from braille.py to script.  With the cleanup from bug #581532 to
   remove the custom brl module and move directly to the brlapi module
   provided by BrlTTY/BrlAPI, we are now able to handle BrlAPI commands
   much better.  This patch 'uncovers' the handling the cursor routing
   keys and the six dot keys; they are no longer swallowed/handled by
   the braille.py module alone.  Instead, they go to the script like
   any other event.  By default, the script just turns around and calls
   braille.py methods, but it can also feel free to override them.  For
   example, it might look at keyboard modifiers along with a cursor
   routing key to see if it wants to select text or not.

   As a note, the BrlAPI events come to us as a dictionary containing a
   bunch of information about the event.  For example, the cursor
   routing command contains information about which routing key was
   pressed.  The six dots command, which is used to turn contracted
   braille on or off, contains information about whether the user wants
   to turn contracted braille on (dots 2-3-5 on my Baum display) or off
   (dots 2-3-6 on my Baum display).  Right now, expressing interest in
   braille events is still done by the command (e.g.,
   brlapi.KEY_CMD_HOME, brlapi.KEY_CMD_ROUTE, brlapi.KEY_CMD_SIXDOTS)
   and it is up to the event handler to determine how to handle the
   arguments.

* Fix for bug #581532 - Remove brl module.  Orca now uses the BrlAPI
   python bindings.

* Fix for bug #582028 - Character pronunciations are not used when
   navigating by line. This provides a fallback to the chnames
   dictionary.

* Fix for bug #582684 - Arrowing left/right across tree tables causes
   whole row to be spoken.

OpenOffice:

* Work on bug #574720 - Table Navigation Keys for OpenOffice Writer.
   This adds in support for Alt + the cursoring keys for navigation in
   OOo tables. Note that you will need to first enable structural by
   pressing Orca + Z. We plan to add in the customizations/settings
   available in the Gecko preferences, as well as for the announcement
   of dynamic row and column headers when navigating.

Firefox:

* Fix for bug #530784 - whereAmI info for list items in web content
   needs to be improved.

* Fix for bug #577900 - Blank lines in Firefox text areas incorrectly
   spoken.

New and updated translations (THANKS EVERYONE!!!):

   See also the overall translation status:
   http://l10n.gnome.org/module/orca

     hu       Hungarian            Attila Hammer and Gabor Kelemen
     ta       Tamil                drtvasudevan

=====================
* Where can I get it?
=====================

You can obtain Orca v2.27.2 in source code form at the following:

http://download.gnome.org/sources/orca/2.27/orca-2.27.2.t...
http://download.gnome.org/sources/orca/2.27/orca-2.27.2.t...

Enjoy!

The Orca Team

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