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 2.30 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 160 bugs fixed for GNOME 2.30. Some of the improvements include:
- The preferences user interface has been updated to improve Orca on netbooks.
- You can now run orca --replace to start a new Orca process that also kills all other running Orca processes.
- Orca now has a new "About" dialogue.
4.2. Other Accessibility Updates
A significant amount of work has gone into GNOME Accessibility to remove Bonobo. The D-Bus implementation of AT-SPI has been made to work side by side with the CORBA implementation. GNOME 2.30 is the last official release that will support the CORBA implementation with D-Bus replacing CORBA in GNOME 3.0.
If you are passionate about making GNOME accessible for all users, now is a great time to join the Accessibility team. Help make GNOME better for users with disabilities and join the GNOME Accessibility mailing list to learn more.