1. Welcome to Orca Introducing the Orca screen reader Joanmarie Diggs joanied@gnome.org

Creative Commons Share Alike 3.0

 Welcome to Orca

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 works with applications and toolkits that support the assistive technology service provider interface (AT-SPI), which is the primary assistive technology infrastructure for Linux and Solaris. Applications and toolkits supporting the AT-SPI include the GNOME Gtk+ toolkit, the Java platform's Swing toolkit, OpenOffice, Gecko, and WebKitGtk. AT-SPI support for the KDE Qt toolkit is being pursued.

Launching <app>Orca</app>

To launch Orca:

Type orca, along with any optional parameters, in a terminal window or within the Run dialog and then press Return.

Configure Orca to launch automatically, by enabling this option in Orca's text setup or on the General page of Orca's Preferences dialog.

Configure Orca to be launched automatically as your preferred screen reader by choosing this option in GNOME's Assistive Technology Preferences dialog.

Quitting <app>Orca</app>

To quit Orca:

Press the Quit button in the Orca main window.

Press Orca ModifierQ. This command works whether the Orca main window is enabled or not.

Type orca -q or orca --quit in a terminal window or within the Run dialog and then press Return.

Load-Time Options

The following options can be specified when launching Orca:

-?, --help: Show the help message

-v, --version: Show the version of Orca

-s, --setup, --gui-setup: Set up user preferences

-t, --text-setup: Set up user preferences (text version)

-n, --no-setupSkip set up of user preferences

-u, --user-prefs-dir=dirname: Use dirname as the alternate directory for user preferences

-e, --enable=option: Force use of option, where the option can be one of the following:

speech

braille

braille-monitor

magnifier

main-window

splash-window

-d, --disable=option: Prevent the use of an option, where the option can be one of the following:

speech

braille

braille-monitor

magnifier

main-window

splash-window

-i, --import-file=filename: Import a profile from a given Orca profile file

-q, --quit: Quits Orca

-f, --forcequit: Forces Orca to be terminated immediately.

--replace: Replace a currently-running Orca

-l, --list-apps: Print the known running applications

--debug: Send debug output to debug-YYYY-MM-DD-HH:MM:SS.out

--debug-file=filename: Send debug output to the specified file