45.alpha - 5 August 2023

NOTE: A beta release will follow in a few days, hopefully including all
of the translations that are in master but never made it to the gnome-45
branch.

New and Modified Features:

* Object Navigator: This allows the user to navigate through a hierarchy
  of UI objects. Bindings:
  - Ctrl+Orca+Up/Down for navigating between parent/child
  - Ctrl+Orca+Left/Right for navigating among siblings
  - Ctrl+Orca+Return for performing a click
  - Ctrl+Orca+S to toggle the simplification of the object hierarchy

* Flat Review can now by restricted to the current object of interest to
  eliminate "noise" from irrelevant objects.
  Binding: Currently unbound

* Flat Review now has a command that displays the entire contents being
  reviewed in an editable text view, making it easier to copy and paste
  the contents of terminals, dialogs, etc.
  Binding: Currently unbound

* Action Presenter: A popup menu for performing accessible actions on an
  object, such as click, expand/collapse, press. This should make it
  easier to interact with applications with poor keyboard navigability.
  Binding: Orca+Shift+A

* The Notification List feature was re-written. It now uses an actual
  Gtk list rather than an off-screen one. The review announcements now
  include a timestamp and the dialog allows you to clear the history.

* Preferences Dialog and Shortcuts List are now grouped based on feature,
  making it far easier to discover and bind/rebind commands of interest.

* The Structural Navigation command to navigate among form fields was
  remapped from Orca+Tab/Orca+Shift+Tab to F/Shift+F. A new command was
  also added to navigate among iframes, which is currently unbound.

* Added a command to present the default button. Binding: Orca+E.

* Modify Orca's left-click functionality to prefer actions which are
  associated with performing a left click (e.g. click, press, jump,
  open) and only attempt to synthesize a click as a last resort.

Bug Fixes and Other Improvements:

* Added the ability to temporarily suspend registration for accessibility
  events which can greatly improve performance at times event floods are
  likely, such as window creation/destruction and activation/deactivation.

* Started preferring AtspiCollection over child iteration to locate
  descendants in the accessibility tree. The performance improvement can
  be up to 10 times faster. We will continue making changes in this area
  between now and the stable release.

* Started relying on speech-dispatcher for character presentation rather
  than our own character names dictionary, which we were not always using.
  This should cause Orca to always speak the character name in the same
  way.

* Interrupt speech conditionally on focus changes. This is needed for
  Gtk 4 on Wayland because we currently do not get notifications for
  input events, which had been our most reliable hint to interrupt speech.
  The heuristics to identify when we should not interrupt speech are
  still being refined, but hopefully this will make the user experience
  a bit more tolerable until a solution is agreed upon and implemented.
  See https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/issues/1046 for more
  information.

* A number of improvements to reduce some lagginess and chattiness in
  certain web apps.

* Added logic to filter out windows which claim to be active but really
  aren't, including descendants of mutter-x11-frames, the desktop frame
  of some window environments, and certain Electron apps.

New and updated translations (THANKS EVERYONE!!!):

  en_GB           British English           Bruce Cowan
  hu              Hungarian                 Attila Hammer
  it              Italian                   Gianvito Cavasoli
  ka              Georgian                  Ekaterine Papava

=========