Announcing Orca v2.27.2

[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 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 v2.27.2?
==================================

2.27.2 - 25-May-2009

General:

* Work on bug #354471 - Text selection from braille input device.
  This is the first step of implementing this feature.  Here's the
  behavior:

  KEY_CMD_CUTBEGIN (Dot 1 + cursor routing key on my display) -
  this will specify the start of a selection.  Orca will merely
  move the caret to the given spot and will clear any existing
  selection.

  KEY_CMD_CUTLINE (Dot 4 + cursor routing key on my display) -
  this will specify the end of a selection and the selected text
  is automatically copied to the system clipboard.  If a selection
  doesn't exist, Orca creates a new one where the other endpoint
  of the selection is where the caret is.  If a selection exists
  and the selection point is outside the existing selection, Orca
  extends the existing one.  If a selection exists and the
  selection point is inside the existing selection, Orca trims the
  selection from the right (i.e., the selected text that's after
  the selection point becomes unselected).

  Known issues that need to be resolved:

  1) This only works in text areas.  It doesn't work across things
     such as paragraphs in OpenOffice.

  2) There's some strangeness with speech feedback: it sometimes
     says "unselected" when the text is selected.  This should be
     fixable, but there also probably shouldn't be any speech
     feedback when doing this from the braille display.

* Fix for bug #466841 - Orca doesn't announce items when Alt+Tabbing
  if Compiz is enabled. This fix is designed to improve Orca's access
  to the basic window switcher in Compiz. There are still bugs in
  Compiz which make providing compelling access difficult, but this
  should at least make switching windows accessible.

* Fix for bug #511468 - Ekiga chat window accessibility problem.

* Fix for bug #574221 - left-pane in Ekiga's preference box can't be
  read at start-up.

* Fix for bug #575614 - Please add speakable characters: → and ←.

* Fix for bug #577977 - provide speech feedback for "repeat last find"
  in Gedit.

* Fix for bug #581372 - Move cursor routing and six dot key handling
  from braille.py to script.  With the cleanup from bug #581532 to
  remove the custom brl module and move directly to the brlapi module
  provided by BrlTTY/BrlAPI, we are now able to handle BrlAPI commands
  much better.  This patch 'uncovers' the handling the cursor routing
  keys and the six dot keys; they are no longer swallowed/handled by
  the braille.py module alone.  Instead, they go to the script like
  any other event.  By default, the script just turns around and calls
  braille.py methods, but it can also feel free to override them.  For
  example, it might look at keyboard modifiers along with a cursor
  routing key to see if it wants to select text or not.

  As a note, the BrlAPI events come to us as a dictionary containing a
  bunch of information about the event.  For example, the cursor
  routing command contains information about which routing key was
  pressed.  The six dots command, which is used to turn contracted
  braille on or off, contains information about whether the user wants
  to turn contracted braille on (dots 2-3-5 on my Baum display) or off
  (dots 2-3-6 on my Baum display).  Right now, expressing interest in
  braille events is still done by the command (e.g.,
  brlapi.KEY_CMD_HOME, brlapi.KEY_CMD_ROUTE, brlapi.KEY_CMD_SIXDOTS)
  and it is up to the event handler to determine how to handle the
  arguments.

* Fix for bug #581532 - Remove brl module.  Orca now uses the BrlAPI
  python bindings.

* Fix for bug #582028 - Character pronunciations are not used when
  navigating by line. This provides a fallback to the chnames
  dictionary.

* Fix for bug #582684 - Arrowing left/right across tree tables causes
  whole row to be spoken.

OpenOffice:

* Work on bug #574720 - Table Navigation Keys for OpenOffice Writer.
  This adds in support for Alt + the cursoring keys for navigation in
  OOo tables. Note that you will need to first enable structural by
  pressing Orca + Z. We plan to add in the customizations/settings
  available in the Gecko preferences, as well as for the announcement
  of dynamic row and column headers when navigating.

Firefox:

* Fix for bug #530784 - whereAmI info for list items in web content
  needs to be improved.

* Fix for bug #577900 - Blank lines in Firefox text areas incorrectly
  spoken.

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

  See also the overall translation status:
  http://l10n.gnome.org/module/orca

    hu       Hungarian            Attila Hammer and Gabor Kelemen
    ta       Tamil                drtvasudevan

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

You can obtain Orca v2.27.2 in source code form at the following:

http://download.gnome.org/sources/orca/2.27/orca-2.27.2.tar.gz
http://download.gnome.org/sources/orca/2.27/orca-2.27.2.tar.bz2

Enjoy!

The Orca Team