The GNOME developers are preparing to release the second and last maintenance version of the GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, which means that several core components and applications have received improvements and bugfixes.
Orca, the open-source screen reader and magnifier, has reached version 3.18.2 as part of the soon-to-be-released GNOME 3.18.2 desktop environment, and according to its internal changelog (attached at the end of the article for reference), it brings numerous enhancements, some new features, as well as multiple bug fixes.
On the Web side of the things, Orca 3.18.2 fixes a regression with the typeahead search in the list-of-elements dialogs, addresses several issues related to displaying of "busy" pages, and improves support for Google Docs, which means users will be able to switch to sticky focus mode and interact better with the online document editor.
Furthermore, Orca 3.18.2 adds support for displaying text changes that come from onclick handlers, no longer generates parents for MathML elements for better performance, removes multiple instances of Gecko output, and implements support for saying word contents for editable emails in Mozilla Thunderbird.
Additionally, more browser chrome event spam is now filtered for increased performance, a workaround has been added for broken lists in web content, links that contain author-provided names will no longer be dropped, and the application will not suggest labels of form fields in Web Apps anymore.
Gedit spellcheck support has been updated
In addition to the multitude of changes mentioned above, Orca 3.18.2 addresses an issue with the key presses being echoed in password fields, implements a sanity check for non-functional accessibility trees, no longer calculates node levels for non-tree descendants, and updates Gedit spellcheck support for GNOME 3.18
The heuristic performance has been improved as well, and the Czech, German, and Hungarian language translations have been updated. Download Orca 3.18.2 right now from Softpedia, though it is recommended that you update the software on your GNU/Linux distribution via the official software repositories.
