A new development version of Orca can be downloaded from Softpedia

Aug 21, 2014 18:07 GMT  ·  By

Orca 3.13.90, a free, open source, flexible, and extensible screen reader that provides access to the graphical desktop via speech and refreshable Braille, is now available for download and testing.

Orca works with applications and toolkits that support the Assistive Technology Service Provider Interface (AT-SPI), which is the primary assistive technology infrastructure for Linux and Solaris.

According to the changelog, the Browse and Focus modes have been implemented to make access to web content and web apps more reliable, support has been added for the presentation of longdesc and "clickable" elements, support has been implemented for the structural navigation by image and by "clickable," and the accessible description is now offered when giving focus to objects.

Also, a number of bugs that caused Orca to loop and/or skip over content have been fixed, presentation of list boxes has been improved, the double-brailling of links in list items has been eliminated, and a couple of SayAll bugs have been fixed.

A complete backlog of updates and bug fixes can be found in the GNOME repository. You can download the Orca 3.13.90 source packages right now from Softpedia, but you won't be able to do anything specific with it. It's best to wait until the final version of GNOME 3.14 is out.

Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.