Distributed as part of the GNOME 3.18.1 desktop environment

Oct 15, 2015 03:20 GMT  ·  By

The GNOME developers are still working hard to release the first maintenance version of the GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, which means that many of the project's core components and applications receive updates these days.

The powerful, free and open-source Orca screen reader and magnifier tool has been updated on October 14 to version 3.18.1, a bugfix release that, according to the internal changelog attached at the end of the article for reference, improves the presentation of canvas elements that are missing fallback content, presents Firefox "door hanger" alerts, and adds an object role Landmarks dialog's list.

Moreover, another fallback "guess" has been added to the source code of the label inference functionality, specifically for those fields that have poorly authored forms. Objects are no longer treated with the ROLE_LABEL variable as an ancestor, which caused duplication of the widget name's presentation, and DOM changes are now processed more efficiently for increased performance.

Many other issues have been fixed and translations updated

Workarounds have been added for various issues that caused the caret to no longer function properly, an aria-roledescription is now presented for non-focusable landmarks, name is now preferred instead of label when the W3C compliance is being generated, the selection event spam is now filtered out from autocompletes, and it is now possible to filter out text elements that don't have a size because for authoring.

Last but not least, Orca is now capable to do SayAll during loading if a document frame is the focused object. As usual, several language translations have been updated, including Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Italian, Serbian, Serbian Latin, German, and Greek. Orca 3.18.1 is distributed as part of the soon-to-be-released GNOME 3.18.1 desktop environment, but you can download the source package right now from Softpedia. More details can be found in the changelog below.

Orca 3.18.1 Changelog