Orca is a free, open source, flexible, and extensible screen reader that provides access to the graphical desktop via user-customizable combinations of speech, braille, and/or magnification. Orca has been been developed by the Sun Microsystems, Inc., Accessibility Program Office via continued engagement with its end users. In fact, the user interface designer for Orca is also a user.

Now that Orca is part of the GNOME Desktop, we've decided to adopt the GNOME versioning scheme to make it easier to correlate Orca releases with GNOME releases. As such the Orca 2.17.x series are designated for the GNOME 2.17.x releases.

The Orca v2.17.0 release represents a relatively stable tarball containing enhancements and bug fixes done since the release of Orca v1.0.0 for GNOME 2.16 in September. Note that we fully expect to do an Orca v2.17.1 tarball for the GNOME 2.17.1 release the week of October 16th.