[Kde-accessibility] FYI: Public release of UltraSonix (Mercator) source code
david powell
achiestdragon at gmail.com
Mon Nov 14 15:45:39 CET 2005
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seems that most of the links and email's are no longer valid but waiting to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
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