[Kde-accessibility] FYI: Public release of UltraSonix (Mercator) source code

[david powell]

On Sunday 13 November 2005 6:53 pm, Gary Cramblitt wrote:
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>  Date: Mon, 30 Sep 1996 19:21:13 PDT
>  From: Keith Edwards <kedwards at parc.xerox.com>
>  To: GUISPEAK at LISTSERV.NODAK.EDU
>  Subject: Public release of UltraSonix (Mercator) source code
>
"snipped"
-----------------------------------

hi
have been doing some searching on this 

i have managed to find the source and a linux binary for this project 

although currently the last file change date was made in oct 1998
it appears that the package is unmaintained at present 

because of changes to x windows and lib's since then i am presently unable to 
get it to run 

i have written emails trying to contact any of the last know developers to 
find out the current state of the project 

seems that most of the links and email's are no longer valid but waiting to 
get replies from those that i have been able to find  , there are a couple of 
mirror sites that still host the code 

should be avalable for download at  http://leb.net/pub/blinux/ultrasonix/ 
if not it email me i will forward a link to the file on my web space 
(because of bandwith limits on my webspace i cannot provide the link here )

as this seems to be currently unmaintained i am willing to try and get the 
project going again , 

i am looking at trying to get hosting for it on sourcfourge but its licensing 
could be a problem 
# 	Note:  The use of this program shall be restricted to educational,
# 	non-commercial use only.  All inquiries regarding licensing this
# 	software for commercial use may be addressed to:
# 	
# 	Georgia Tech Research Corporation
# 	Technology Licensing
# 	Centennial Research Building - Rm. 275
# 	400 Tenth Street, N.W.
# 	Atlanta, Georgia  30332-0415

what i need is someone who could wrtie to them to see if it would be possable 
to change this to a gnu gpl or lgpl license 
and explain that because of the current licence that we would have problems 
hosting this as an open source project in its current form 
and that it will seriously affect the future of further development of it 
if it cannot be changed 

i am not good at that sort of letter and needs someone with a better 
undersanding  of licensing issues to explain that  than i can 


i have been looking at the code , should not be too hard to add support 
for festival and kttsd and others  
the hard point is going to be gui support , the fact that it supports only
some old x windows style widgets 
looks like there may be a lot of work needed to bring it up to date 

what it does have  is a combination of sound and voice  
in that a sound is played insted of speech in some cases 
like mouse enters a window aria 
not shure if this is done by other screen readers but like the concept 

in the documentation there is mention of it requireing modified x11r6 libs to 
work  
quote
"""""
Currently, applications require specially-modified versions of the X
client-side if they are to be recognized by the screenreader.  We have
worked with the X Consortium to ensure that most of the changes needed
by UltraSonix are present in the core distribution.   This minimizes
the required changes to port to a new platform.    These changes, and their 
status, are listed below:

Modification			X Support	UltraSonix Support
========================================================================
Xt HooksObject			Shipped X11R6	Supported
XESetBeforeFlush Xlib hook	Shipped X11R6	Supported
ICE Rendezvous mechanism	Shipped X11R6.1	Supported (see 6.0)
Remote Access Protocol (RAP)	Not Shipped	Supported (see 6.0)
Xlib GC cache hook		Not Shipped	Supported
"""""

as this seems to point to support for it being included within x11r6
and that requests for changes and hucks in the code had been made 
the current state of there support needs to be looked at to see if they 
are still included and if the other required ones where ever added  

but  also may be possable to adapt it to use at-spi or qt4  

my overall thoughts on it

in some ways this looks a good choice as it does not just depend on kde / 
gnome  as a window manager 
it has some good concepts that it includes  like the mixture of sounds and 
speech
the down side is its license in its current form ,if we cannot get it changed 
then there is little hope for it 

from my point of view i don't have a lot of time that i could spend codeing 
and my codeing is not strong on gui stuff , but i will have time to coordinate 
work on it , and keep the project alive in some way ,this will depend greatly 
on if the license can be changed though 

if the license issue can be resolved i will apply again to get it hosted as a 
sourceforge project , and see about getting some extra devs to help 

think its a shame that the code has been left for so long with no active 
maintainer

Dave