Thursday, 9th November 2006
Summary
Joe Clark is appealing for supporters to donate small amounts of money, although he won't be upset with larger donations, to support him while he starts an accessibility research project.
Author: Gez Lemon
The Open & Closed Project
The Open & Closed Project is something Joe has been working on for four years:
- Write a set of standards (how-to manuals) for four fields of accessibility — captioning, audio description, subtitling, and dubbing. (This is not Web accessibility except to the extent that Web sites use multimedia with one or more of those features.) The standards will be based on evidence and research. Where either of those is missing, we'll carry it out ourselves. It will take four years to write the standards, which will be done in an open process. (Again, this is not Web accessibility. It also isn't the WCAG Samurai.) Then we'll test them for a year and fix whatever doesn't work. The published standards will not be open-source or public-domain, but will be freely downloadable (and available in print and other formats at a cost).
- Next, we'll develop training and certification programs. At that point, it will finally be possible to go to school to become a certified practitioner of captioning, audio description, subtitling, or dubbing, and it will also be possible for TV networks, movie studios, producers and distributors, and regulators to require accessibility services to be Open & Closed Project-certified.
- We're also going to work on a universal file format for the four fields of accessibility, which has been attempted several times before with no success.
- We'll design and test new fonts for captioning and subtitling. In fact, that activity is already underway and has been for nearly two years.
Full details for the project can be found on Joe's request for support for this research project page.
Category: Accessibility.
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