Announcing Orca 0.2.5

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

================
* What is Orca ?
================

Orca is a scriptable screen reader for the GNOME desktop for people
with visual impairments.


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

We've done a lot of work on Orca since the last release in both the
new functionality and quality/stability departments.  We thank all of
our users that are providing feedback on gnome-list gnome org (see
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list) as well as
http://bugzilla.gnome.org.  We value all of your feedback and help.

We also appreciate contributions from community members, including Al
Puzzuoli who is doing a great job helping with the Orca Wiki at
http://live.gnome.org/Orca and Francisco Javier Dorado MartÃnez who
has been testing and providing patches.  Thank you all!


==================
Orca 0.2.5 Changes
==================

* Re-map keyboard bindings and add additional keyboard bindings.
  See http://live.gnome.org/Orca/KeyboardCommands for the list.

* Improvements to StarOffice support to provide better access to text
  documents and spreadsheets.  Also get rid of spurious "0.00" text
  that was showing up in braille for StarOffice buttons.

* Addition of announcing text selection as it is selected and 
  unselected.

* Generalize the "read table cell row" functionality.  If you press
  Insert+F11, it will toggle the feature to read the entire row of
  a table or just the selected table cell when you move from row to row.

* Improved support for SayAll of text objects (SayAll for flat review
  is still on the to do list).

* Addition of self-voicing module to tell Orca to be quiet when a
  self-voicing application is present.

* Addition of ability to turn Orca into a speech server that can
  accessed via simple HTTP commands (default port is 20433, but this
  is customizable via orca.settings.speechServerPort).  This will
  allow self-voicing applications to use Orca for their speech, thus
  letting them get the user's speech settings preferences.

* Addition of orca.settings.enableBrailleGrouping (default=False).
  NOTE: this represents a change in the UI for Orca - the behavior to
  date has been to always group menu items on the braille display.
  The system responsiveness was bad for large menus, however, so we
  decided to make this an optional feature turned off by default.

* Addition of utility to report information on the currently active
  script.  This is primarily for helping script writers do debugging
  and is accessed by pressing Insert+F3.  

* Addition of orca.settings.cacheAccessibles (default=True) as a
  means to turn the local caching of accessible objects on or off.
  This is primarily an Orca developer debugging feature.

* Fix for bug 344218 - gnome-terminal would not be presented properly
  if it was started after Orca.

* Fix for bug 343666: pressing buttons on braille displays could cause
  a hang.

* Partial fix for bug 342022 - provide some defensive mechanisms to help
  prevent some hangs.

* Fix for bug 343133 - do not hang when doing a flat-review of a man
  page in gnome-terminal.

* Fix for bug #343013 - the command line option strings should not be
  translatable.

* Partial fix for bug 319652 - become a better Python thread citizen 
  to help reduce hangs.

* Fix for bug 342303 - stop speech when the user presses the mouse
  button.

* Fix for bug 342122 - use all labels for an objecty when presenting
  an object.

* Fix for bug 342133 - do not read all labels in gnome-window-properties
  application when it appears.

* Fix for bug 341415 - when moving between workspaces with metacity,
  eliminate redundant output and alsomake sure workspace names are
  announced.

* Refactor of various modules to move script writing utilities into
  util.py.

* More fleshing out of the test plan.


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

Source code:
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/orca/0.2/orca-0.2.5.tar.gz

Enjoy.

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