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.

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 v2.17.1 release contains a number of enhancements plus some rather aggressive refactoring in the areas of support for UTF-8 and unicode. We believe Orca v2.17.1 is relatively stable, but we look forward to feedback from our users outside the en_US locale.You can obtain Orca v2.17.1 in source code form at the following URL:

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/orca/2.17/orca-2.17.1.tar.bz2
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/orca/2.17/orca-2.17.1.tar.gz