Announcing Orca v2.27.4

[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 read more about Orca at http://live.gnome.org/Orca.

==================================
* What's changed for Orca v2.27.4?
==================================

LOTS of stuff.  Please read the following carefully.

2.27.4 - 13-Jul-2009

General:

* Fix for doo#9676 - Orca fails to launch.  Make sure setting the PATH
  follows sh syntax and not bash.

* Latent work for bgo#400729 - Orca should provide support for general
  audio.  This adds some latent support for audio that gives people
  something to experiment with as soon as bgo#570658 is done.

* Fix for bgo#561452 - Factor out included "louis" C extension.  Orca
  2.27.4 and beyond now require liblouis 1.6.2 and the liblouis 1.6.2
  "louis" python module in order for contracted braille to work with
  Orca.  See http://live.gnome.org/Orca/Braille for more information.

* Fix for bgo#568696 - locus of focus changes when updating list of
  files in nautilus.

* Much more work on bgo#570658 - Refactor the speech and braille
  generators. This refactor is almost complete. After a pass to
  simplify and consolidate the formatting strings, we should be ready
  to document how you can customize Orca presentation for yourself.

* More work on bgo#575614 - Please add speakable characters: → and ←.

* Fix for bgo#583199 - orca should not hang itself, or the desktop
  when brltty is killed. This fix allows BrlTTY to be killed,
  restarted, started before Orca, started after Orca, etc.  This
  requires a fix in BrlTTY that will appear in a to-be-released
  version of BrlTTY (i.e., the fix is not in BrlTTY 4.0).  Note that
  this change has caused us to change the default value of
  settings.enableBraille to False to prevent speech-only users from
  incurring unnecessary overhead.

* Fix for bgo#584796 - Invoking the application specific preferences
  for Orca when in the Orca Quit dialog freezes speech.

* Fix for bgo#585103 - Inconsistent behavior of flat review.

* Provisional work on bgo#585417 - Allow pauses to be inserted in
  speech output.  This provides code that will modify the speech
  formatting strings if orca.settings.useExperimentalSpeechProsody is
  True (the default value is True for this release).  This allows
  users to experiment with the prosody work Hammer Attila has done
  before we finally commit to it.

  NOTE: to indicate things are still experimental, informational
  messages will be included on the command line where you run Orca.
  These informational messages say that pauses have been added to the
  formatting strings.  When the integration is done, these messages
  will be removed.

* Fix for bgo#585897 - Pronunciation substitution can miss words due
  to word delimiters

* Fix for bgo#586385 - When I using where am I function with
  Openoffice.org Calc, the spoken row and column information are not
  marked for translation.

* Fix for bgo#586580 - Orca repeats the coordinates of Calc cells.

* Fix for bgo#588403 - Implement ability to route the mouse pointer
  without clicking. This implements support for routing the pointer to
  the current location (either the area under flat review or the
  locusOfFocus).

* Fix for crash (no bug number) - Prevent stack trace when contracted
  braille is being used. The trace would also kill speech.

OpenOffice/StarOffice:

* Fix for bug #583811 - Doing a select all in OOo Writer causes Orca
  to say "selected" for each paragraph.

Thunderbird:

* Fix for bgo#584263 - When I compose or reply to a message with
  Thunderbird, the Ctrl+End key combination does not work.

* Fix for bgo#584837 - Find dialog fails to move caret to desired
  location in Thunderbird.

* Fix for bgo#568658 - Sometimes Orca announces the wrong subject in
  Thunderbird.

Firefox:

* Fix for bgo#584540 - Orca should not duplicate images and lines of
  text on facebook

* Fix for bgo#585871 - WhereAmI info in FF doesn't include link
  text.

* Fix for bgo#587794 - In some pages I cannot read using the Down
  Arrow key.

* Fix for bgo#588344 - Missed text on a page in Firefox.

New and updated translations (THANKS EVERYONE!!!):

    cs       Czech                Lucas Lommer
    es       Spanish              Francisco Javier Dorado Martinez and
                                  Jorge Gonzalez
    hu       Hungarian            Attila Hammer and Gabor Kelemen
    uk       Ukranian             Maxim Dziumanenko

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

You can obtain Orca v2.27.4 in source code form at the following:

http://download.gnome.org/sources/orca/2.27/orca-2.27.4.tar.gz
http://download.gnome.org/sources/orca/2.27/orca-2.27.4.tar.bz2

Enjoy!

The Orca Team