Will just announced the release of Orca 2.21.4.

I just need to repeat how amazed I am at how much work we got done this release. The last release was only 2 weeks ago, yet we accomplished a lot in the areas of performance, bugs, magnification, and Firefox. It's difficult for me to choose any one of these as being the highlight of this release [...]

Agreed on all counts! The Orca team is awesome. And we really did accomplish a huge amount in the past couple of weeks, all of which is detailed in Will's announcement.

I'm not normally one to toot my own horn, preferring instead to be just "another member of the team." Besides, I don't own a horn.... But I feel the need to toot... something... just this once because... well... I worked awfully darn hard the past couple of weeks. When I wasn't doing my "day job" or sleeping, I was working on the magnification features for this release. Given that several times I woke up with an idea or a solution for implementing a feature, I apparently was even working while sleeping. And I am still cleaning crumbs out of my keyboard. Phew!

I'm also not normally one to toot the horn of others, but I'm going to make an exception there as well because the herculean effort that went into the new magnification features was only half my doing. It was a tag-team effort with the other half being done by Rich who, I might add, has the patience and tolerance of a saint ("Rich, I know it's Sunday evening, but I'm adding new features and I need....").

I thought tag-teaming might be challenging with really large patches going back and forth, and trying to keep all of the changes straight, but it all happened quite smoothly -- aside from one minor mishap where I inadvertently converted an enormous Glade file from the version the team is using (2) to a version it's not (3). Oops.... And then checked it in. D'oh!

Anyhoo, with no further ado, Orca's new magnification features:

• Support "live updating" when setting various magnification features

  Changes made to the zoomer in the Orca Preferences now update in real time: it is no longer necessary to press the Apply button to see if the option you've chosen works for you and then undo it or adjust it if it doesn't. Note that you must still press the Apply or the OK button to make your changes permanent.

• Bug #452316 - should have a "fullscreen" checkbox

  We've added a Position combo box so that it's easy to select the position of the zoomer. The options are full screen, left half, right half, top half, bottom half, and custom. Choosing custom allows you to specify the location of each edge of the zoomer. The new default zoomer position is full screen if full screen magnification is possible. Otherwise, the right half of the screen will be used by default.

• Bug #463881 - Evaluate other gnome-mag features for inclusion in Orca prefs

  You can now adjust the brightness and contrast levels and use the colorblind filters from libcolorblind. Basic brightness and contrast levels can be adjusted through the spin buttons on the Magnifier pane of the Orca Preferences dialog. If you press the Advanced Settings button at the bottom of that pane, you'll be placed in a dialog box where you can customize the red, green, and blue brightness levels and contrast levels individually. The Advanced Settings dialog is also where you can choose a color filter. These options should enable you to create the color scheme that works best for you.

  You can also add a border to your zoomer to help separate it from the non-magnified area. The border size and color are customizable. We've also separated the cursor color from the cross-hair color so you no longer have to find the one color that works best for both.

• Bug #464705 - Provide option to keep caret in center of magnifier region of interest

  We've added individual tracking and alignment settings for controls and the text cursor: each can have an alignment of centered or push (move the magnifier window the least). In addition, you can now specify an edge margin for the text cursor. This margin is how close the caret should be allowed to get to the edge of the screen before it's time to "push." The margin can range from 0 to 50%, with 50% being the equivalent of choosing centering. These options should make it easier to keep track of your location on the screen and ensure that you can always see the area around your point of focus.

• Bug #501414 - Orca should have (unbound) keybindings for quickly changing magnification settings

  We've added the following new commands:

  • Toggle color enhancements
  • Toggle mouse enhancements
  • Increase magnification level
  • Decrease magnification level
  • Cycle to the next magnifier position
  • Toggle magnifier on/off

  These should help you quickly change the zoomer to best access what you're working on. These commands are "unbound," meaning they do not have a keystroke assigned to them. You can define the keystrokes you would like to use on the Key Bindings pane of the Orca Preferences dialog: locate each command you wish to define a keystroke for, move to the Key Binding column, and press Return. You'll be prompted for the new key. Press it (rather than type it out) and then press Return. Note that these commands do not permanently change the settings; they merely alter them "on the fly."

• Bug #503965 - Orca should provide support for the pointer following focus and the zoomer

  If you're using the keyboard to perform a task and then move the mouse pointer, the zoomer would move away from your task and to the location of the mouse pointer. We've added two options for dealing with this:

  • Pointer follows zoomer (enabled by default): If the mouse pointer is not on the screen when you initially move the mouse, it will be moved into the zoomer so that you can continue to see what you were working on. If your preferred mouse tracking mode is centered, the pointer will be moved to the center; otherwise it will be moved to the item with focus.
  • Pointer follows focus (disabled by default): If this option is enabled, the mouse pointer will follow you as you arrow through menu items and move among controls in dialog boxes.

We've still got a ways to go with our magnification support: bugs to fix, performance to improve, more gnome-mag features to implement, and support for Compiz eZoom. Still, what we accomplished in this release is huge I think. Thanks Rich!!