Orca (assistive technology)
Accessibility software / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Orca is a free and open-source, flexible, extensible screen reader from the GNOME project for individuals who are blind or visually impaired. Using various combinations of speech synthesis and braille, Orca helps provide access to applications and toolkits that support AT-SPI (e.g., the GNOME desktop, Mozilla Firefox/Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice and GTK, Qt and Java Swing/SWT applications).
Initial release | September 3, 2006; 17 years ago (2006-09-03) |
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Stable release | |
Preview release | n/a (n/a) [±] |
Repository | |
Written in | Python |
Operating system | Unix-like |
Type | Screen reader Accessibility |
License | GNU LGPL (version 2.1)[2] |
Website | orca |
The name Orca, which is another term for a killer whale, is a nod to the long-standing tradition of naming screen readers after aquatic creatures, including the Assistive Technology product on Windows called JAWS (which stands for Job Access With Speech), the early DOS screen reader called Flipper,[3] and the UK vision impairment company Dolphin Computer Access.[4]
As of GNOME 2.16, Orca is the default screen reader of the GNOME platform, replacing Gnopernicus.[5] As a result, Orca follows the GNOME stable release cycles of approximately six-months.[6] Orca is provided by default on a number of operating system distributions, including Solaris,[7] Fedora,[8] openSUSE[9] and Ubuntu.[10]