orca-0.2.4

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

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

Orca is a scriptable screen reader for the GNOME desktop for people with
visual impairments.  For more information see:

http://www.gnome.org/projects/orca/index.html
http://live.gnome.org/Orca

NOTE: www.gnome.org may still say the latest stable release is 0.2.2.
As of the writing of this e-mail, we've updated the web content in CVS
and are waiting for the automatic updater for the page to fire.

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

==========
Orca 0.2.4
==========

For the Orca 0.2.4 release, we concentrated on the major issues opened
when we proposed Orca for inclusion into GNOME 2.16:

  1) Orca 0.2.4 introduces both GUI and text configuration 
     mechanisms for setting user preferences.

  2) Orca 0.2.4 also includes support for magnification.  For 
     this support to work, gnome-mag-0.12.5 (soon to be released), 
     is required.

Orca 0.2.4 also introduces support for key and word echo and fixes to a
number of bugs.  A detailed list of the changes are as follows:

0.2.4
* Addition of text and GUI preferences configuration tools.
  NOTE: 0.2.4 eliminates orca-setup and replaces it with the
  "--setup" (GUI or text, depending upon your environment),
  "--gui-setup" (GUI), "--text-setup" (text), "--no-setup"
  (bypass any automatic setup mechanism - useful for running
  with gdm accessible login) command line options to the
  "orca" command.  You can also bring up the GUI while orca
  is running by pressing Insert+space.
  WARNING: 0.2.4 also introduces an incompatible change to
  the configuration file and requires you to "rm -rf ~/.orca"
  and rerun orca setup.
* Fix for bug 340662 - do not require the desktop to be running
  to set up orca preferences.
* Addition of support for magnification similar to that in
  Gnopernicus.
* Fix for bug 331512 - addition of key and word echo.  We need
  community feedback on this.
* Work on specifying the external dependencies for building
  and running Orca.
* Fix for bug where metacity workspaces (accessed via
  Ctrl+Alt+Arrow) were being announced as inaccessible.
* Work on dealing with the Java platform giving us
  CORBA::Unknown objects instead of Bonobo::Unknown objects.
  Java platform support, however, still has a long way to go.
* Work on coping with CORBA COMM_FAILURES a little better.
* Fix for bug 338097 - better support for the "planner"
  application.
* Work for bug 338890 - add ""--version" option to orca to
  output the version.  Orca also now uses the getopt facility
  to get command line options.
* Fix for bug 340773 - focus events were interrupting the
  automatic reading of dialog boxes.
* Fix for bug 340625 - better handling of table cells.
* Fix for bugs 340559, 337371 - reduce repetitive output of
  slider values.
* Fix for bug 319732 - move .label logic from atspi.spi to
  something that can be more easily overridden by scripts.
* Fix for bug 340481 - combo box updates were not being
  handled correctly.
* Fix for bug 340305 - combo box labels were not being presented.
* Fix for bug 340556 - radio button group names were not being
  presented.
* Fix for bug 338839 - allow speech to be enabled/disabled using
  Insert+s.
* Fix for bug 339932 - shutdown orca better on Ctrl+C from
  the command line.
* Fix for bug 339927 - use floating point values for speech
  rate, gain, and pitch to provide finer granularity of settings.
* Fix for bug 341415 - attempt to listen for AT-SPI events and
  present accessible information even if no accessible windows
  are active when orca starts.
* Work on bug 340849 - automatically enable desktop accessibility
  if needed and remind the user to log out and log back in for
  this to take effect.
* Additions to and development of the test plan.

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

Source code:
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/orca/0.2/orca-0.2.4.tar.gz

Enjoy.

Will, Mike, Rich, and the Orca community