Joe Clark is setting up an ambitious accessibility project. The Open & Closed Project aims to write a set of standards for the four fields of accessible media: captioning, audio description, subtitling, and dubbing.
The project will develop its set of standards through research and evidence-gathering. The standards will then be tested for a year in the real world, after which it training and certification programmes will be developed for practitioners. Finally the project will continue the work of developing and testing improved fonts for captioning and subtitling, and create a universal file format. Like I said, its an ambitious project.
Ambitious projects need funding – in this case $7 million. But that’s not where you come in. Joe intends to fund raise that sum himself, however that in itself is a full time job, so Joe is looking for micropatronage to subsidize him for four months while he beavers away at the fundraising. Joe is aiming for the lucky sum of $7,777 and you can help by donating as much or as little as you like.
The Open & Closed Project is not neccesarily a Web accessibilty project, except to the extent that Web sites use multimedia with one or more of those features, but it should benefit millions of people across the globe, in providing access to media both on and offline. I’d love to see it happen, so I’ll be contributing to Joe’s food money over the next few months. If you don’t feel the same way, you could always run one of his banners, which are well worth a look.
