I'm pleased to announce that, after much travail, there is a source code relase of UltraSonix (nee Mercator) available for non-commercial use. UltraSonix is a screenreader that can allow visually-impaired users to access X Window System applications on Unix machines.
UltraSonix was developed at Georgia Tech during the period 1991 to 1995. Development work is no longer going on there, and we (the ex-developers) wanted to make sure that the code got out to people who could use it. Please be advised though that I have very limited (read: nearly zero) time for supporting this code.
The screenreader was developed as a part of a research project and still has some rough edges. Hopefully public domain development will smooth out some of these. The source code as it stands now is known to compile and run on Sun SPARCstations running Solaris 2.5 and the Common Desktop Environment (CDE). If you're interested in running it "as-is" on Solaris, I can provide you with a binary distribution that should work.
Mark Novak (menovak@facstaff.wisc.edu) has graciously agreed to coordinate ongoing work to port the screenreader to Linux. Send him email if you're interested in contributing to the porting effort; quite a bit of work has already been done.
The source code is available via anonymous ftp at:
This file includes the complete source code for the core system, as well as the source code for RAP, the Remote Access Protocol for the X Window System. There are some other porting considerations that I'll be in contact with Mark Novak about. At some point in the future I'll make the source code for the various I/O servers we wrote available from this ftp site as well.
Once again, this release is free for non-commercial use. If you're interested in using this code or any part of it for commercial use, let me know and I can give you the names of the folks in the Office of Technology Licensing at Georgia Tech who handle that sort of thing.
There are a few people on this list who already have the source code under non-disclosure from Georgia Tech. This snapshot is exactly the same as what you have, except that it has some extra legal verbiage in it about the terms of distribution. Please make sure that any code you distribute has this verbiage in it.
Feel free to drop me a line if you have any questions!
Keith Edwards
kedwards@parc.xerox.com
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