The maintainer of the Orca screen reader, Joanie Diggs, has made noteworthy enhancements in recent weeks. I mention them here for the benefit of those who are not following these developments or who are not regular Linux screen reader users.
Many of the improvements are performance-related, taking advantage of the cache of accessibility tree nodes maintained by the AT-SPI service. Table processing has received particular attention, and fundamental changes are underway in the code that handles users' keystrokes, some of which need to be interpreted as screen reader commands, with the remainder being passed through to the application.
I have been testing some of the changes along the way, as have other users active on the Orca mailing list. Rapid and precise bug reports continue to contribute to the development process. At this point, it is reasonable to expect these valuable improvements to appear in a release during the first half of 2024, presumably as part of GNOME 46.
#linux #orca #ScreenReader #AssistiveTechnology #accessibility #Gnome