Accessibility remains a core asset of the GNOME project in its mission to bring free software to everyone. The Accessibility team has been working hard with the support and collaboration of their users and other teams and individual contributors of GNOME over the past year.

Orca has long had many advanced settings that could be taken advantage of, but only by manually editing the customizations file. In order to improve access to these settings, some of them have now been integrated into Orca’s GUI. These include but are not limited to:

• The default capitalization style you wish to use in addition to Orca's capitalization voice: plays a tone, speaks the word "capital" or none. Moreover, this setting can be toggled on the fly and cycled through the available capitalization styles.
• Rewind/fast-forward and structural navigation in Say All. Orca's Say All feature plays a documents 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 text, skip past text, or use structural navigation without having to restart Say All.

By popular demand, some features available in Windows screen readers like NVA or JAWS have now been included in Orca. We hope this will help users in their transition to free desktops. The progress bar now beeps and clipboard and selection operations including copy, cut, paste, undo, redo, selection deletion, and selection restoration are available to the user.

Orca's Flat Review, a spatial representation of the active window's contents, received a lot of bug fixes and efficiency improvements. For example, better performance of clustering zones into lines, and the non-responsiveness problem when invoking flat review in very large tables (e.g. Thunderbird folder with 40,000 messages) was resolved.

WebkitGTK+ received some improvements including name and description compatibility of elements with W3C specs or making meter elements accessible. Also, an important fix was released, so that Orca will echo key presses instead of speaking the inserted characters in password fields.

Several D-Bus AT-SPI bugs have been fixed and some performance improvements have been included. And finally, many minor ATK bugs and compilation problems have been resolved.

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