The accessibility of GNOME is one aspect many contributors are very proud of. Our work on usability and localization helps to make the software we create truly usable by anyone. In the past year, two new versions have been released, and with the help of the community, many bugs have been reported and fixed.
Caribou, the GNOME on-screen keyboard, added a tool to generate keyboard layouts from CLDR (Common Locale Data Repository) files. The Unicode CLDR provides key building blocks for software to support the world's languages, with the largest and most extensive standard repository of locale data available.
Orca introduced support for rewind/fast-forward and structural navigation in its Say All feature. This feature speaks document content from your present location to the end of the document. By default, pressing any key will interrupt Say All's presentation. With these settings, the user can move within the document in order to re-hear something which was just read, skip past text of no interest, or use structural navigation without having to restart Say All.
Evolution, the personal information manager, is again accessible after its migration to WebKitGTK+, and Orca was adjusted to take advantage of this. New ATK roles were added for identifying fractions, roots, subscripts, or superscripts in mathematical content. A new role was also created to reflect static/generic objects. Orca added support for all of these new roles.
One of the major new accessibility features is the support for MathML in Orca. MathML (Mathematical Markup Language) is a markup language used for describing mathematical notations and capturing both its structure and content. It aims at integrating mathematical formulae into World Wide Web pages and other documents. Orca's MathML support works with Firefox, and it is a work-in-progress for WebKitGTK+. Firefox not only received MathML support, but also improvements on Orca performance for Google Docs applications and other rich text editors like Etherpad.
In the accessibility infrastructure side, many tests for AT-SPI ATK has been written, greatly helping to maintain the code quality and avoiding the introduction of new bugs.
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Images
Possible picture for the article
http://bit.ly/1UQNhxB by Jeremy Mikkola
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
Comments
* What are ATK roles? Is it an acronym we can spell out? - Nuritzi - RESOLVED, keep as is.
Reviewer(s) notes
Reviewed by RosannaYuen on 20-May-16
Reviewed by Nuritzi on May 31, 2016