Announcing Orca v2.24.4

[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 generous contributions 
from the Mozilla Foundation and wonderful community members.

You can also read more about Orca at http://live.gnome.org/Orca.

==================================
* What's changed for Orca v2.24.4?
==================================

The Orca v2.24.4 release is a maintenance/bugfix release for GNOME 
v2.24.  It contains important fixes for hangs, usability issues, and 
handling of ARIA-enabled web content.

2.24.4 - 18-Feb-2008

General:

* Fix for bug #553678 - orca can act badly at login time.  This was a
  bad one where pressing Ctrl+s to invoked Orca in speech mode after
  pressing Ctrl+m to invoke Orca with the magnifier would cause the
  magnifier to freeze in one spot.

* Fix for bug #561548 - Orca locks up when closing some Pidgin
  conversations.  Also helps with bug #567864.  This was a very bad
  hang that several people reported on the Orca list.

* Fix for bug #568589 - braillegenerator adding image string versus
  braille.Component for table cells.  This was exposed after the
  OpenSolaris packagemanager made changes to add accessible names for
  images in the package list.  Prior to the fix for bug #568589, Orca
  would go silent in the revised packagemanager list.

* Fix for bug #568751 - Interaction with the punctuation preferences
  can cause a hang.  This was another bad hang reported on the Orca
  list.

* Fix for bug #568875 - Pressing "Apply" button in preferences dialog
  causes autostart option to be checked.  This caused some users much
  confusion.

* Fix for bug #569343 - Speaking of indentation is misleading.  Users
  deemed this to be misleading enough that they wanted this fixed for
  2.24.4 (i.e., they didn't want to wait for 2.26.0).

* Part of fix for bug #570387 - Clean up the speech tab of the
  preferences UI. This causes Page Up and Page Down to work on the
  hscales.  Before this, only the arrow keys worked, which could
  require users to arrow 1 unit at a time across a 100 unit scale.

* Fix for bug #572294 - Need a sanity check in the default script's
  locusOfFocusChanged.  This would cause Thunderbird to go quiet and
  also cause Orca to consume normal typing keys that it should not
  consume.

Evolution:

* Fix for bug #567428 -"readonly text" spoken when caret changes line.
  This was a big usability issue.

* Fix for bug #570390 - Spellcheck in evolution is badly broken.

Firefox/Thunderbird:

* Fix for bug #537303 - Certain FF3 add-ons interfere with Orca's
  ability to provide access to content.

* Fix for bug #567864 - Orca stops responding when flat review is used
  in thunderbird message window and message is closed.  This was a
  very bad hang reported by several users on the Orca list.

* Fix for bug #567984 - Structural navigation needs to consider text
  within the document frame.

* Fix for bug #568631 - Orca does not update the position for
  same-page links which reference objects by name/id in Firefox 3.

* Fix for bug #568768 - Orca starts at the top of a newly-loaded page
  rather than the specified fragment.  This was a very bad usability
  problem when navigating across web pages.

* Fix for bug #552965 - (ARIA) aria-valuetext ignored

* Fix for bug #555540 - (ARIA) Add support for additional landmark roles.

* Fix for bug #568467 - (ARIA) aria-describedby text spoken twice via
  Where Am I

* Fix for bug #568550 - (ARIA) Add default keybindings for navigating by
  landmarks

* Fix for bug #569346 - (ARIA) No speech for image-only ARIA buttons
  and ARIA menu items

* Fix for bug #569835 - (ARIA) Orca should support the ARIA haspopup
  attribute

* Fix for bug #570551 - (ARIA) UIUC Number Guessing Game Alert Dialog
  not presented when it appears.

* Fix for bug #570524 - (ARIA) Issues with Dojo combo box interaction.

* Fix for bug #570532 - (ARIA) Alert text not brailled when navigating
  it.

* Work on bug #571058 - (ARIA) Orca's caret navigation is kicking in
  when it shouldn't be.

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

You can obtain Orca v2.24.4 in source code form at the following:

http://download.gnome.org/sources/orca/2.24/orca-2.24.4.tar.gz
http://download.gnome.org/sources/orca/2.24/orca-2.24.4.tar.bz2

Enjoy!

The Orca Team