Announcing Orca v2.17.3

[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 v2.17.3, 
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 v2.17.3?
==================================

* Implementation of RFE 373566: Added support to switch between
  desktop and laptop bindings.  Also added support for allowing the
  Caps Lock key to act as the Orca modifier.

* Added feature to the preferences dialog to present the key bindings
  as progress towards RFE 354970.  Many thanks to Jorge Sand�for
  this work!

* Implementation of RFE 354463 - The "Find" command is now working,
  with the exception of bug 381391.  Many thanks to Joanie Diggs for
  her hard work on this!

* Implementation of RFE 376002: Added command line options to tell
  Orca to start with speech, braille, and/or magnification.  This
  is mostly to aid things such as accessible installs and logins.

* Work on RFE 371122: much of the "Where am I" command has been
  implemented, though we're still testing and refining it.

* A fair amount of work has been done on the Gecko script for Firefox 3.
  Please note this is still a work in progress and is still somewhat
  unstable.  The Orca and Firefox teams are working feverishly on the
  support and are still targetting Firefox 3 for compelling web
  access.

* Continued work on identifying (and resolving when possible) 
  accessibility issues in other applications.  Please do a search on 
  the "orca" component at 
  http://bugzilla.gnome.org for summaries containing the "[blocked]"
  string to get a list.

* In the callback for the Cancel button on the Orca Preferences
  window, the code has been adjusted to destroy that window, so that
  the next time the user displays the Preferences dialog, all of the
  settings will reflect the current running state rather than how the
  user left the GUI components before hitting the Cancel button.

* Fix for bug 372808: Orca now reports the appropriate header
  information when tabbing between tables.

* Fix for bug 377085: family-name text attribute are no longer
  malformed for multi-word family names.

* Implementation of RFE 377955: Suggested additions to pronunciation
  dictionary.

* Fix for bug 376347: Orca no longer speaks new-line in the
  Evolution menu bar.

* Fix for bug 372964: Added text-attribute settings.

* Fix for bug 376006: Handle minimum increment value of 0.0 when
  calculating decimal places to present for sliders.

* Fix for bug 358467: Mapped the time-admin to the users-admin
  script so that Orca can correctly read the table of time servers.

* Change for bug 364529. Initial value in the Preferences Glade file
  for pitch is now 5.0 and not 9.0.  Also allow voice styles to be
  undefined.  The hypertext link voice will now initially derive
  its values from the default voice settings.

* Partial fix for bug 356060: Provide access to tree item level and
  state in OOo Navigator.

* Defensive fix for bug 353432: Orca no longer announces name changes
  for objects who tell us their name has changed when it really
  hasn't.

* Work on bug 363815: Implement the ability to have application
  specific settings.

* Fix for bug 364452: make sure Orca's name shows up as "orca" and not
  "-c" in at-poke.

* Fix for bug 319666: Orca now announces "0 items" when encountering
  various empty objects.

* Fix for bug 381653: Orca now announces the new state of a checkbox
  when it is changed inside a table cell.

* More work on the specification and regression test suite.

* New and updated translations (THANKS!):

    et      Estonian             Ivar Smolin and Priit Laes
    hu      Hungarian            K��K�nczy and Gabor Kelemen
    sv      Swedish              Daniel Nylander

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

You can obtain Orca v2.17.3 in source code form at the following URL:

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/orca/2.17/orca-2.17.3.tar.bz2
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/orca/2.17/orca-2.17.3.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