Announcing Orca v2.17.0

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

===============
* 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 has been
been developed by the Sun Microsystems, Inc., Accessibility Program
Office via continued engagement with its end users.  In fact, the user
interface designer for Orca is also a user.

Now that Orca is part of the GNOME Desktop, we've decided to adopt the
GNOME versioning scheme to make it easier to correlate Orca releases
with GNOME releases.  As such the Orca 2.17.x series are designated for
the GNOME 2.17.x releases. 

The Orca v2.17.0 release represents a relatively stable tarball
containing enhancements and bug fixes done since the release of Orca
v1.0.0 for GNOME 2.16 in September.  Note that we fully expect to do an
Orca v2.17.1 tarball for the GNOME 2.17.1 release the week of October
16th.

==================================
* What's changed for Orca v2.17.0?
==================================

* Updates to user requirements and functional specification.

* Added Orca man pages.

* New and improved regression test harness.

* Added new Orca main window to allow one to have a GUI option for
  quitting Orca and invoking the configuration settings.  The appearance
  of this window can be enabled/disabled in the new "General" tab
  of the configuration dialog.  Also added "Apply" button the 
  configuration GUI window.

* Added new Orca "Quit" dialog.

* Refactor in default.py and other scripts to add isTextArea method to
  determine if an object is a text area or not.  This allows us to deal
  with the growing number of things that are text areas, but choose to
  give themselves different roles (e.g., GTK's 'text', OpenOffice's
  'paragraph', and Gecko's 'entry').

* Added Gecko.py toolkit script to cover apps that use the Mozilla
  Gecko toolkit (e.g., Firefox, Thunderbird, Yelp, etc.).  Some work
  done with new Firefox 3 at-spi implementation, but much work is
  still needed.

* Added repeated character count handling (rfe/bug 354469).

* Added military spelling (rfe/bug 354460).

* Fix for bug 351957: Orca now allows the setting of the source and 
  target displays for magnification.

* Fix for bug 351569: no longer hang when gnome-keyring password box
  appears.

* Fix for bug 344192: no longer hang when the "bug buddy" dialog
  appears.

* Fix for bug 355602: $ was being echoed twice in terminal with word
  echo enabled.

* Fix for bug 357150: use 'append' instead of 'extend' to avoid
  spelling out the 'No focus' message.

* Fix for bug 358508: use obj instead of event.source in
  visualAppearanceChanged for speech.

* Fix for bug 353532: provide a workaround for a java-access-bridge 
  bug (bug 355011) where popup menu events are not sent to Orca.

* Fix for bug 353531: 'checked'/'unchecked' are no longer reported
  twice for check boxes in java applications.

* Fix for bug 357556: Insert key no longer sticks after running test
  keystroke files. The hot-key to start/stop recording of keystrokes
  within Orca has been reverted to just "Pause".  Also adjusted the
  "don't write pause keystrokes" code to recognize F21 (which is the
  Pause key on my Sun type 6 keyboard).

* Partial work on bug 354970: add command_name dictionary from Jorge
  Sandin (thanks Jorge!).  Also refactored the way keybindings and
  braille bindings are defined and obtained to make it easier to
  discover and override their definitions.

* Partial work on bug 349954: become more cognizant of multibyte UTF-8
  characters.

* Fix for bug 357509: Flat review now uses the "uppercase" voice
  settings for uppercase text when navigating by line.

* Fix for bug 357507: SayAll now uses the "uppercase" voice settings
  for uppercase text.

* Fix for bug 356970: repeated character count now works with Evolution

* Fix for bug 356911: Orca no longer generates a traceback with
  Numpad-Minus when positioned at the end of a line.

* Fix for bug 356179: the test in Orca to determine if the desktop
  is running now works better.

* Fix for bug 340849: Orca now provides an option to allow the user to
  automatically logout of the GNOME desktop if the gconf accessibility
  flag wasn't previously enabled before running the setup utility.

* Fix for bug 355927: duplicate window titles are now spoken when
  navigating between them using Alt+Tab.
        
* Fix for bug 350216: "LAYERED_PANE" is no longer in speech context.

* Fix for bug 351797: make sure configuration GUI pops to top.

* Fix for bug 347128: allow pan buttons to be used on braille display
  while in learn mode.

* Fix for bug 347650: allow a script to determine if it is the active
  script or not (compare self to orca_state.activeScript).

* For for bug 354983: From Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo novell com> (THANKS!) 
  to fill in dead code paths in brlmodule.c.

* Fix for bug 354487: apostrophe no longer delimits a word boundary.

* Fix for bug 354985: gedit script no longer generates a traceback due 
  to a missing import line.

* Fix for bug 342602: StarOffice Writer table cell speaking order fixed.

* Fix for bug 351826: change orca shell script from sh to bash to allow
  it to better respond to "kill -HUP" signals.

* Fix for bug 352866: add "-q" and "--quit" usage information
        
* Fix for bug 353600: don't require the user to be root when doing a
  "make distcheck".

* New and updated translations (THANKS!):

    dz      Dzongkha             Pema Geyleg
    el      Greek                Simos Xenitellis
    es      Spanish              Francisco Javier F. Serrador
    et      Estonian             Priit Laes
    gl      Galician             Ignacio Casal Quinteiro
    th      Thai                 Supranee Thirawatthanasuk and
    tr      Turkish              Deniz Kocak and Baris Cicek

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

You can obtain Orca v2.17.0 in source code form at the following URL:

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/orca/2.17/orca-2.17.0.tar.bz2
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/orca/2.17/orca-2.17.0.tar.gz

>From the Sun Microsystems, Inc., Accessibility Program Office,

Willie Walker, Project Lead
Mike Pedersen, User Interface Design
Rich Burridge, Core Development and Scripting
Lynn Monsanto, Core Development and Java Platform Support
Michele Budris, Program Management