Announcing Orca v2.17.4

[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 development
has been led by the Sun Microsystems, Inc., Accessibility Program Office
via continued engagement with its end users and contributions from 
wonderful community members.

The Orca 2.17.x series are designated for the GNOME 2.17.x releases, 
but should also work well on the GNOME 2.16.x releases.

NOTE ON FIREFOX SUPPORT: we know many of you are anxiously awaiting
compelling access to the web via Orca and Firefox.  As of v2.17.4, 
the support is still under development and both the Orca and Firefox 
teams are working feverishly to get it there for Firefox 3.

==================================
* What's changed for Orca v2.17.4?
==================================

* Added new support to edit your key bindings from the Orca
  preferences dialog (thanks Jorge Sand�!!)

* Added new implementation of "Where Am I" based upon the discussion
  on the Orca user's list (thanks for your work, everyone!).

* Fix for bug 382891: Flat review now works in the face of empty text
  areas (thanks Joanie Diggs!!).

* Fix for bug 381391: Flat review initialization now handles
  situations where the caret is at the end of a text area (thanks
  Joanie Diggs!!).

* Fix for bug 382408: Eliminated significant sluggishness when
  navigating in OOo Writer tables (many thanks to our Orca users
  for speaking up about this!).

* Fix for bug 382495: orca --setup is now localized (thanks Takao!).

* Fix for bug 382418: Orca now announces when you enter/leave a table
  in OOo Writer documents.

* Fix for bug 382880: Orca now provides speech output when tabbing
  among cells in OOo Writer documents.

* Fix for bug 382888: Orca now announces when you cross a cell boundary
  in OOo Writer tables.

* Fix for bug 382415: Orca now honors speak cell/row setting in OOo
  Writer tables.

* Fix for bug 384393: Orca now reports bold or underline in OOo Writer
  when Insert F is pressed (this was a regression).

* Fix for bug 375395: Orca now speaks blank lines in Evolution when
  appropriate.

* Allow Orca to run better under gdm for accessible login.  With this
  work, we've been informed by the gdm maintainer that Orca is the
  first assistive technology ever that can run without requiring gdm
  to have a home directory. NOTE: the typical line to add to
  /etc/X11/gdm/modules/AccessKeyMouseEvents is something like the
  following, depending upon what you want Orca to do when it starts:

  <Control>o  1 1000 10000  /bin/sh -c "GTK_MODULES=gail:atk-bridge ctrun -l child -i none orca -n -d main-window"

* Improved support for BrlTTY v3.8.  Orca will now first attempt to
  use the new Python bindings for BrlAPI 0.5 (which is what comes with
  BrlTTY v3.8) and then fallback to its own bindings for BrlAPI 0.4.1
  (which is what comes with BrlTTY 3.7.2).  When using BrlTTY v3.8,
  Orca is now a better BrlTTY citizen: Orca only consumes BrlTTY
  events that it cares about, and Orca is also smarter about which TTY
  it chooses. NOTE: Our plan is to eventually retire Orca's BrlAPI 0.4.1
  Python bindings as BrlAPI 0.5 becomes more prevalent.

* More work done with Gecko.py (the Firefox script), but there's still
  a lot of work to do here, both on the Firefox and Orca
  implementations.

* More work done with Thunderbird, but there's still a lot more work
  to be done with it as well, both on the Firefox and Orca
  implementations.

* Improvements and additions to the Orca regression test harness.

* New and updated translations (THANKS!):

    es	    Spanish	         Jorge Sand�and 
                                 Francisco Javier F. Serrador
    nb      Norwegian Bokm�    Kjartan Maraas
    sl	    Slovenian            Matic Zgur

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

You can obtain Orca v2.17.4 in source code form at the following URL:

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/orca/2.17/orca-2.17.4.tar.bz2
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/orca/2.17/orca-2.17.4.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