Announcing orca-2.17.2

[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.

The Orca 2.17.x series are designated for the GNOME 2.17.x releases.

==================================
* What's changed for Orca v2.17.2?
==================================

Orca 2.17.2 contains a number of enhancements and bug fixes since
2.17.1.  We've been very busy, and are addressing feedback from our
users and testers as fast as we can.  We thank you all for your feedback
and help!  We also thank the users from the Orca User's Group meeting in
Boston - many great ideas came out of that and we look forward to doing
it again.

2.17.2 - 05-Nov-2006

* Updates to requirements and specifications documents.

* Fair amount of work on Gecko.py script, though it is not at all ready 
  for compelling access to Firefox (and hence the web) yet.  Also did 
  a fair amount of work looking at flat review and filing a number of
  bugs against the AT-SPI implementation in progress in Firefox 3.

* Fix for bug 369292: gcalctool now speaks the new result when
  the "=" button is activated.

* Fix for bug 337063: Orca now supports an alternate .orca location via
  the -u and --user-prefs-dir command line options.
	
* Fix for bug 365939: reading of message list in Evolution now provides
  more concise information for check box items.

* For for bug 353422: Mapped vte application to gnome-terminal script 
  and also fixed the "backspace" problem in gnome-terminal.

* Workaround for bug 368626: prevent gnome-panel from crashing and add
  some defensive code to work in the case where there is no event
  source in an at-spi event.

* Fix for bug 338838: Orca now speaks "newline" only when moving by 
  character or word.

* Fix for bug 358467: Orca now reads check items status 
  in "Users and groups" dialog of users-admin application. 

* Fix for bug 355733: SayAll function now works better for OpenOffice.

* Fix for bug 364086: Orca no longer reports "paragraph 0 paragraph"
  when you begin typing in a OpenOffice Calc cell.
	
* Fix for bug 363801: Orca provides confirmation when dynamic row and/or
  column headers are set.  In addition, column numbers in OpenOffice
  Calc are now spoken as column letters.

* Fix for bug 363807: Orca now reports the number of items in a table.

* Fix for bug 321184: Orca now supports a custom pronunciation 
  dictionary.

* Fix for bug 363802: Orca no longer says "cell" when navigating from
  cell to cell in OpenOffice Calc.

* Fix for bug 363796: Second press of a letter in learn mode now 
  provides the phonetic ("military") spelling of the letter.

* Fix for bug 355525: Orca handled EMBEDDED_OBJECT_CHARACTERs in text
  better.

* Fix for bug 357063: If there are a bunch of repeated characters
  (like the greater thans) on a line that also has text, Orca respects 
  the punctuation settings in Orca.  But, if the repeated characters   
  are on a line by themselves (i.e.  30 greater thans, nothing else),
  Orca indicates their presence ("30 greater than characters") 
  regardless of the level of punctuation.

* Fix for bug 344249: Orca reports menu mnemonics as part of the
  "Where am I" functionality.

* Fix for bug 348975: the state for radio buttons is now spoken prior
  to the role.
	
* Fix for bug 363423: Orca now speaks the "Applications" menu if it is
  brought up while the focus is in a GAIM chat window.

* Fix for bug 349956: Orca no longer causes the gedit Print Dialog to 
  slow down.

* Fix for bug 361624: Flat review no longer fails to move to second
  column of text in OOo Writer documents.

* Fix for bug 357829: Use real active descendant of a table cell when
  looking for locus of focus in flat review.
	
* Fix for bug 341406: Orca now presents results when finding files.

* Fix for bug 319783: Orca now speaks/brailles the insensitive states
  of objects if they are insensitive.

* Fix for bug 338111: Use new BrlAPI Python bindings if they exist. 

* Fix for bug 348693: Announcement of new mail in Evolution is now
  toggleable via Insert-m.

* Fix for bug 361670: flat review no longer fails after minimizing the 
  Orca main window.

* Fix for bug 355893: Network Preferences "Port" label is now reported
  by Orca.

* New and updated translations (THANKS!):

    et      Estonian             Ivar Smolin and Priit Laes
    nb      Norwegian Bokm�    Kjartan Maraas
    sv	    Swedish		 Daniel Nylander

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

You can obtain Orca v2.17.2 in source code form at the following URL:

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/orca/2.17/orca-2.17.2.tar.bz2
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/orca/2.17/orca-2.17.2.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