The Accessibility developers has been working hard with the support and collaboration of their users over the past year.

An experimental Chrome/Chromium support has been started in Orca in version 3.32 and work kept in progress in version 3.34. We hope that soon it will be ready for end-user testing. In order to make this happen, ATK support in Chromium has been heavily improved.

Because there was no attribute included to identify that the ATK_ROLE_SECTION is an insertion or deletion and in order to be consistent with what has been done for other elements which have corresponding ARIA roles, two new roles ATK_ROLE_CONTENT_INSERTION and ATK_ROLE_CONTENT_DELETION were introduced into ATK/AT-SPI2. This change improves the accesibility of web browsers.

The notion of a "accessible identifiers" has been introduced in AT-SPI2. These are very similar to HTML IDs: like variable names, they are expected not to change much over development. This can be used e.g. by automated accessibility regression tests to identify widgets instead of relying on the textual content (which is very likely subject to changes and translations). It is also worth mentioning that AT-SPI2 can now optionally work with dbus-broker.

As usual, the vibrant Orca community reported issues with popular software like Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, GNOME apps, GNOME-Shell or Mate, that were in most cases fixed. In many cases, these issues were not Orca issues, but app issues or even toolkit issues. However, most of these issues were not fixed in time and Orca had to solve it by itself providing a custom script to manage these misbehaviours. This is a suboptimal solution, so it is sensible to encourage all developers to prioritize accessibilty issues to the best of its abilities.

Orca Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) support has also been improved by adding progress marking support. Also, notification support has been added for letting Orca tell screen magnifiers that progress of speech synthesis, allowing the magnifier to show what is being spoken. AtkText got a new scrolling API so we can make sure that the text being spoken is actually visible for the magnifier to show it in applications like Firefox and LibreOffice. Accerciser, the interactive accessibility explorer for the GNOME desktop, now highlights in the application the text selected in the accerciser interface, thus allowing to check the exact text positioning, which is needed for proper Mouse Review support in Orca. Orca's Mouse Review, a feature causes Orca to present the object under the mouse pointer, has received a lot of attention with improved overall presentation of units of text under the pointer or improved logic filtering out irrelevant mouse movements during review, just to mention a few improvements.

The accessibility feature Pointer Location has been updated to work under Wayland sessions now. When the feature is enabled, pressing Ctrl will highlight the pointer location on the screen.

An ATK crate has been published, this means a library that contains safe Rust bindings for ATK. This work is part of the or Gtk-rs project, that brings Rust bindings of GTK+ 3, Cairo, GtkSourceView and other GLib-compatible libraries.

The Java ATK wrapper has seen a lot of rework to make it far more reliable. There is still work needed, and some of it has to be done on the OpenJDK side, but the state is definitely much better.