Orca 3.17.4 is now available for download and testing

Jul 23, 2015 01:10 GMT  ·  By

The Orca open-source screen reader and magnifier software used in numerous GNU/Linux operating systems, including Ubuntu and other GNOME-based ones, has reached version 3.17.4 as part of the upcoming GNOME 3.17.4 desktop environment.

According to the raw changelog attached at the end of the article, Orca 3.17.4 is a feature release that implements speech support for MathML content in web browsers powered by the Gecko engine, adds a handling for the ROLE_HEADER variable, and introduces support for notifications in the status bar.

The gnome-autogen.sh script has been deprecated, state-changed:busy events are now being ignored from nested web docs, non-focused links won't get locusOfFocus until the document is in focus, Evo's "autocomplete" popups are now being handled automatically, and a utility method has been created for getting and caching the tags of a web element.

There are also fixes for multiple regressions that have been introduced by the new "web" script in the previous milestone of the software, Orca 3.17.3, the old "inaccessible" hack for the Marco and Metacity window managers has been removed, and various command-line strings have been marked for translation.

Mozilla Thundebird 38's new spellcheck dialog is supported

In addition to the changes mentioned above, Orca 3.17.4 adds support for toggling the speech engine through keyboard shortcuts when the speech function is disabled, and the app can now handle the modifications introduced in the spellcheck dialog of the Mozilla Thunderbird 38 email and news client.

Lastly, several language translations have been updated, including Greek, Spanish, French, and Portuguese. Those of you who want to take the Orca 3.17.4 unstable release for a test should keep in mind that it's a pre-release version. Thus, we don't recommend installing it on production environments. Download the Orca 3.17.4 sources right now from Softpedia.

Orca 3.17.4 Changelog