Orca 2.24.0 Release Notes

New Features

Many bug fixes and performance improvements across the board
Improvements to navigating and presenting information from gnome-panel
Inclusion of new tutorial message option. When enabled, tutorial messages will be spoken when you navigate to objects.
Progress bar updates now spoken by default
New "echo by sentence" feature
Magnifier now allows you to turn off the system sprite
End of line symbols in braille are configurable per application
New feature to allow bypass of Orca's keyboard commands (the default keybinding is Orca+Backspace)
New --list-apps option to print the list of known applications -- good for checking if the AT-SPI infrastructure is working
Default synthesis engine choice now takes language of user into account
Added ability to configure autostart on login directly from Orca user preferences dialog
New feature to provide awareness of unfocused dialogs when an application gains focus
Much work on Java support -- it's vastly improved
GNOME Help (yelp) is working much better now thanks to the combined efforts of several teams
Orca now reads the next/previous paragraph in StarOffice/OpenOffice when you navigate to them via Ctrl+Up and Ctrl+Down
Much work on Thunderbird usability
Much work on Firefox stability and usability, including work on ARIA gmail interface and support for ARIA "required" state
Support for verbalized links
Support for chatroom-specific message histories in Pidgin

See the open bugs in the Orca bug database. We not only track Orca bugs in the Orca bug database, we also track bugs in other components that affect Orca's ability to provide good access to them.
NOTE: Compiz has gotten better, but it is still not fully accessibility friendly at this point in time. We recommend you stick with Metacity until the Compiz kinks are worked out. If you're using Compiz and want to switch to Metacity, you can run the following command: metacity --replace.