Joe Clark needs you to help him get some proper research on captioning on the way

If some of you have wondered what happened to the outspoken accessibility guru Joe Clark in the last few months, he has been busy. What Joe is trying to do is raise money to finish his open and closed project, which is a research project on the things Joe has been very much keen on advertising the last few years:

The Open & Closed Project is a research project headquartered in Toronto. Our main goal is to write a set of standards for the four fields of accessible media – captioning, audio description, subtitling, and dubbing. We’ll develop those standards through research and evidence-gathering. Where research or evidence is missing on a certain topic, we’ll carry it out ourselves.
We’ll test the finished standards for a year in the real world and publish them. (You’ll be able to download them for free or buy them in several formats.) Then we’ll develop training and certification programs for practitioners. It will finally be possible to become a certified captioner (or audio describer or subtitler or dubbing artist).
We’ll also develop and test improved fonts for captioning and subtitling (already underway). We’ll develop a universal file format.

Now, all of this costs money, and Joe assumes he’ll need 7 million Canadian Dollars to get this thing going for a year. To make matters even worse, he cannot really find the time to bug possible capital givers to get to these 7mill. That is why he set up a micropatronage page at http://joeclark.org/micro/ and wants you, and me and everybody to help him get together 7,777 Canadian Dollars to get a whole month off to search for wealthier supporters in earnest.

So, if you can spare some money, go and donate a small amount to get him on the way.

[tags]joeclark,accessibility,captioning,openandclosed,charity[/tags]