mezzoblue

Accessible Micropatronage

Something I’ve always appreciated about Joe Clark is that, within the group of those dedicated to accessibility on the web, he’s one of a very select subset that places equal importance on the design of a site. You’ve likely heard of his adamant stance against WCAG 2 (for reasons that boil down to plain common sense in a lot of cases), and his follow-up project WCAG Samurai.

Now he’s decided to place your money where his mouth is. In an ambitious effort to improve the world of accessibility, he has launched The Open & Closed Project, an initiative to write a set of standards for the four fields of accessible media — captioning, audio description, subtitling, and dubbing. The project will develop those standards through research and evidence-gathering, and where research or evidence is missing on a certain topic, they will carry it out themselves.

That’s the executive summary, there’s a lot more detail on-site, and a short-term pledge drive to kick it off. I’ll leave the further explanation to Joe, but if you’re interested in supporting this project, it’s well worth a look, and perhaps kicking in the price of your morning coffee one day this week.