orca-0.2.8

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

==============
* What is it ?
==============

Orca is a scriptable screen reader for the GNOME desktop for people with
visual impairments.  The orca-0.2.8 release is targeted for the GNOME
2.16 Beta 2 (GNOME 2.15.91) release, but also works well on the Ubuntu
6.06 platform with GNOME 2.14.

GREAT NEWS!!!!  Orca was recently accepted in to the GNOME 2.16
desktop:  

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/devel-announce-list/2006-August/msg00000.html

Thank you everyone for your support!

==================
* What's changed ?
==================

==========
Orca 0.2.8
==========

* Many thanks to the team from Baum for their contributions in
  improving the support for the Java platform.

* Much improvement in the reliability and availability department.
  Thanks very much to community members for helping test Orca and
  providing us with constructive feedback and informative bug reports.
  These community members include: Joanmarie Diggs, Al Puzzuoli,
  Fco. Javier Dorado Mart�z, and Cody Hurst.  

* Improvements to Yelp access.

* Improvements to Firefox 2 chrome.  NOTE: we are targeting Firefox 3 
  as the means for providing compelling access to web content.  Interim
  releases of both Orca and Firefox 3 will be continually available as
  progress continues on this front.

* The main 'orca' executable is now a shell script that launches the
  Python process for orca.  It includes some utilities to clean up
  stray processes and latent support to automatically detect failures
  in Orca and restart it if necessary.  We will be improving this
  script prior to the GNOME 2.16 release.  Your testing and feedback
  will be helpful!

* Improved support for the emacspeak speech service, including better
  ACSS support for DECtalk and overall support for rate/pitch
  parameters.  Many thanks to Joanmarie Diggs for her contributions to
  this space.  The community model works!

* Fix for bug 347691: In standard print dialog, printer table items
  not always spoken/displayed.

* Fix for bug 345462: Orca should speak changes when moving up a level
  in menus.

* Fix for bug 341371: Orca will not report the file name in file
  picker when there is only one file existing in current folder.

* Fix for bug 319738: The child routine() needs to be more careful
  about indices out of bounds.

* Fix for bug 319660: Exiting learn mode should display current locus
  of focus.

* Fix for bug 348980: Get braille cursor routing keys working again.

* Fix for bug where window activated and deactivated events can arrive
  out of order.  Thanks to Baum for this fix!

* Defensive programming in the event that expected object 
  specializations (e.g., text, component, selection, etc.) don't 
  exist.  Thanks to Baum for this fix!

* Created orca.desktop to add orca to menu items.

* Migrated to LINGUAS model
  (http://live.gnome.org/GnomeGoals/PoLinguas).

* Added additional testing and debugging utilities.  Also added
  additional helper lines to ~/.orca/user-settings.py that make
  it more convenient to turn on/off various debugging and testing
  utilities.  

* Pychecker fixes and also eliminated circular imports in the python
  modules.

* Additional keystrokes files for testing.  We're ramping up 
  our regression tests and hope to have a more complete set by 
  the GNOME 2.16 release.

* Provide smoother handling of the crosswires and cursor in the
  magnifier when tracking the mouse.

* New/Updated Translations (Thanks!): 
    Latvian:     Raivis Dejus
    Macedonian:  Jovan Naumovski
    Tino Meinen: Vincent van Adrighem
    Gujarati:    Ankit Patel
    Spanish:     Francisco Javier F. Serrador
    Greek:       Nikos Charonitakis (NEW)

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

Source code:

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/orca/0.2/orca-0.2.8.tar.gz

Enjoy.

Will, Mike, Rich, Lynn, and the Orca community