Tuesday September 05, 2006

Orca turns 1.0.0, as part of GNOME that turns 2.16 tomorrow

Several of my colleagues in the Sun Accessibility Program Office - along with quite a few folks in the open source community and in several different blindness organizations and our friends at BAUM in Germany and Romania - have been working diligently for the last many months on the open source scripting screen reader Orca. Over the weekend Willie Walker (Orca team lead) announced the release of version 1.0.0 of Orca. Orca is part of the open source graphical desktop GNOME 2.16. This Orca release is part of the GNOME 2.16 release, which is set for tomorrow.

Willie's announcement notes the version 1.0.0 goal "to provide usable access to key office productivity applications", including the GNOME graphical desktop, the desktop help system, simple text editing, the text terminal, electronic mail, an enterprise calendar and contact manager, instant messaging, rich text editing, and spreadsheet access. Another way of saying this is that Orca 1.0.0 works with the GNOME desktop, yelp, gedit, gnome-terminal, evolution, gaim, and OpenOffice Writer & Calc (and also StarOffice Writer & Calc). Also notable in Willie's announcement is the translation work of over 60 individuals who have worked to translate Orca into over 40 different languages/locales. I understand that some of these - like the Spanish translation - are already being use by blind individuals mated to one of the Spanish voices for the open source Festival text-to-speech engine (available today with the Ubuntu GNU/Linux desktop, Edgy version release Knot-2). (2006-09-05 18:12:41.0) Permalink