What's New In Accessibility

GNOME has a passion for making software available to everyone, including users and developers with impairments that can make it harder to use their computers. To help, GNOME created the GNOME Accessibility Project and an accessibility framework that is now a standard on libre desktops.

GNOME 2.28 continues to build on its prior accessibility credentials with several improvements.

4.1. Orca Screen Reader

The Orca screen reader has had significant work done to reduce program bugs and improve performance, with over 140 bugs fixed for GNOME 2.28. Some of the improvements include:

  • new support for different progress bar "verbosity levels" to allow you to control whether progress bar updates should be spoken even if the progress bar is not in the active window
  • ability to move the mouse without performing a click
  • support for mouseovers, including the ability to interact with an item displayed in the mouseover
  • presentation of misspelled words when editing text
  • completely rewritten speech and Braille generators, now with the ability to play sounds in the speech generator

4.2. WebKit Accessibility Support

Significant effort has been done to improve WebKit accessibility, in particular the addition of caret navigation and the initial implementation of Atk's accessible text interface. Once the accessible text interface has been fully implemented, users will be able to access content without using the mouse and have it presented to them in speech and/or braille via the Orca screen reader.