Tuesday March 13, 2007 Orca v2.18.0 Released
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Will released Orca version 2.18.0 yesterday. This is a stable release for GNOME 2.18, which the GNOME community will release in the next few days. |
Orca has come a long way in the last year. That was when we outted it and went public at the CSUN conference in Los Angeles. It was then added as the default screen reader to the GNOME desktop in the 2.16 release, about six months ago.
The announcement and release notes show what we've been concentrating on for GNOME 2.18.
What that doesn't really show is the user and developer community that has built up around Orca. There is a very active mailing list. One of the great things to see is that newbie questions are being answered by Orca users who were newbies themselves 6-9 months ago. We are getting lots of good feedback on not only accessibility problems found when using Orca, but also suggestions on how we can improve the product.
Which brings me nicely onto the way we are using Bugzilla with Orca. Will has written a nice page in the Orca wiki on this.
As of this writing, there are 156 "bugs" filed against Orca. 55 of those are what we call "tracking" bugs. The actual bug is for another component or application and maybe even in a different bug tracking system. We just keep a tracking bug against Orca so that users can have one stop shopping when they are looking for bugs that affect Orca. The downside of this is that it confuses automated scripts that do bug totalling and doesn't accurately reflect reality. We've learnt to live with that.
We also are very open about our future plans for Orca. We keep a spreadsheet as part of the Orca source code distribution. A lot of the tasks in that spreadsheet also have a matching Bugzilla entry.
And finally I'd like to congratulate Joanie Diggs, who over the last year, has gone from being an Orca community member, to an Orca developer, to being one of the five core Orca maintainers. Amongst many other things, Joanie authored the new Find functionality in Orca v2.18.0 and has been actively stomping on Firefox accessibility bugs in the last few weeks. Thankyou!
There aren't many female GNOME developers, but as Joanie points out, there is one advantage. You don't have to wait in line to use the restrooms at GUADEC.
[Technorati Tag: Accessibility]
( Mar 13 2007, 09:12:04 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink
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