14 DAY TRIAL // The GNOME Project is about to release the second Beta build of the anticipated GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, which means that many of the core components and related apps received multiple improvements in the last week.
Among these, we can mention the popular Orca open-source screen reader and magnifier software, which has been updated to version 3.17.91 a.k.a. 3.18 Beta 2, a release that adds several improvements and fixes multiple bugs reported by users since the first Beta build of the software. The documentation has been updated as well in this development version.
According to the internal changelog, which we've attached at the end of the article for reference, Orca 3.18 Beta 2 treats unordered and ordered HTML lists that don't have items as divs, fixes a line navigation issue with MathML, adds the ability to override object roles during the generation of tutorial messages, and is capable of handling multiple event floods from the GNOME-Shell and LibreOffice projects.
Additionally, the cache is now automatically cleared when the next and previous contexts can't be found, an issue that caused the software to omit various web content during the "Say All" operation was fixed, the caret navigation around images that don't have a size or content and lack interaction has been improved, and a new option that supports speaking for 12 hours without seconds has been introduced.
There are more Firefox and LibreOffice improvements
Moreover, Orca 3.18 Beta 2 is capable of handling multiple "The process appears to be hung" AT-SPI2 errors from the LibreOffice and Mozilla Firefox software, treats web documents as top-level roles in order to detect zombie processes, adds a workaround for broken custom listboxes and comboboxes that don't have items, and addresses an issue in presentation of chat messages that came from non-active apps.
Also, the Catalan, Spanish, Hungarian, Swedish, Chinese (Taiwan), Greek, Swedish, and Galician language translations have been updated. If you wish to test this Beta release of Orca, you can always download the Orca 3.18 Beta 2 sources right now from Softpedia, but please try to keep in mind that this is a pre-release software, so it is not suitable for production use.