The accessibility of GNOME is one aspect many contributors are very proud of. It also helps, together with our work on usability and localization, to make the software we create truly usable by anyone. In the past year, two new versions have been released, as always, with the help of the community many bugs has been reported and fixed.
The Universal Access section in the Settings application has added a new Cursor Size selection dialog where the cursor size can be combined with zoom to make it easier to see the cursor.
Orca support for web browers received a lot of attention and ARIA support was improved:
- Ensure we always announce ARIA landmark type before setting the caret
- Improve presentation of ARIA regions
- Add custom support for ARIA switch role
- Present messages resulting from use of aria-invalid
Additionally, Orca introduced support for Digital Publishing ARIA. This specification expands ARIA to produce structural semantic extensions to accommodate the digital publishing industry. This is particularly important for structural divisions of long-form documents and embedding semantic metadata for Web-application widgets. It enables semantic navigation, styling and interactive features.
Orca support for Libreoffice has been improved by fixing many bugs and introducing some work-arounds that benefit the experience of our users.
Several D-Bus AT-SPI bugs has been fixed and some performance improvements has been included. And finally, Minor ATK bugs has been resolved and it has been migrated to the meson build system.