14 DAY TRIAL // We announced the other day that GNOME 3.16 Release Candidate was made available for testing and that many of its core components, applications, and libraries had been updated. Orca, the default screen reader and magnifier of the GNOME desktop environment, has been updated as well, with a great number of improvements, bug fixes, and updated translations.
According to the raw changelog, Orca 3.16 Release Candidate (the exact version number is 3.15.92) revamps the heuristic that is currently used to identify layout tables, updates the internal landmark role list in order to synchronize it with the ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) specifications, and table details are no longer outputted if the verbosity level is set to brief.
The application will now check for the brand-new accessible roles for documents in structural navigation, which are currently needed for table navigation in the latest Writer versions, fixes bogus information presentation and a hang issue with the Mozilla Firefox web browser, verifies Zombie accessibles in the onCaretMoved() function of the Writer tool in order to avoid deleted paragraphs.
Several Gecko issues have also been repaired in Orca 3.16 RC
Moreover, the Release Candidate version of Orca 3.16 corrects outdated links in the documentation, and addresses a translator comment symbol issue for the bowtie operator. When navigating items by landmark, the application will now display the line instead of all object contents, and it no longer relies on the displayedText() function to determine if a table cell is blank or not.
Last but not least, several Gecko issues have also been repaired in Orca 3.16 RC, related to terminated accessible objects and SayAll. The Czech, Polish, Danish, Slovenian, and Bosnian language translations have been updated. Download Orca 3.16 RC right now from Softpedia, but keep in mind that it’s an unstable piece of software that should not be installed on production machines.