What does the Open & Closed Project really mean?
You know our major goal is to write a set of standards for captioning, audio description, subtitling, and dubbing, based on research and evidence. Then we’ll test them in the field for a year, publish them, and train and certify practitioners. We’ll also work on better fonts and a universal file format. And all this will be done in the open.
You know all that. But what does it mean?
- Your existing practices will change
- They have to – we aren’t just adopting one company’s practices as a failed “standard.” You probably don’t work for that company anyway, so even if we did that, the way you carry out captioning, audio description, subtitling, or dubbing would change. It absolutely will change under the Open & Closed Project specification, since we’re starting from scratch. You cannot keep doing what you are doing now and call yourselves Open & Closed–compliant
- We will contradict established practices – sometimes
- It is a sure thing that research and testing will disprove and discredit some existing practices, which will have to be changed
- We will expose existing practices as being untested – sometimes
- Especially in subtitling, a field with an impressive theoretical research basis and almost no testing, many practices will not pass muster with actual audiences and will have to be changed
- We won’t test the most basic and obvious concepts
- It would be pointless to test the question “Should captioning use correct spelling?” We assume a basis in reality, like good spelling and punctuation. That doesn’t mean that other fundamentals of orthography cannot or will not be tested. (Most notably, all-upper-case captioning will be thoroughly tested)
- There is no one who can’t participate
- Participation is open to all, without qualification
- We can’t make you participate
- Participation is voluntary. If you tell us you won’t help or if you just ignore us, we may keep asking until we get a yes
- You’ll have ample time to propose suggestions, improvements, criticisms, or objections
- We think it will take four years to write the standard, at any time during which you may speak up. Many companies and organizations will be specifically contacted for that purpose (e.g., every known practitioner in many countries). After that, we’ll have a year’s testing and a certification period. Even if you say nothing during the development process, you can still comment during those periods, though, at that late date, it may not always be possible to make every change you would like
- We can’t make you comply with our specs
- Once completed, the Open & Closed Project specifications will be voluntary. We aren’t a regulatory body and we can’t make you use our specs. Regulatory bodies and others may, however, do exactly that
- You can’t produce your own variant of the spec
- You can’t pick and choose the portions of our specs that you like and adhere only to those, nor can you rewrite parts of it and claim to comply with that rewrite. There will be one standard without variation. It is of course true that our standard will take into account the variations of technology and language (English closed captioning for HDTV is different from Bengali film subtitling), but the Open & Closed Project standard will not be a suggestion or a starting point. A standard with multiple competing variations isn’t a standard
- This isn’t software development and it isn’t open source
- The Open & Closed Project will copyright its documents, but there will be extremely generous usage terms. We cannot envision a scenario in which any royalties would be payable to use the specifications for captioning, description, subtitling, and dubbing. We will probably charge for fonts. You’ll be able to download the standards documents for free or buy them in physical formats. These documents, and any fonts, are not, however, open-source and will not be treated as such. You will not have a right, as in open-source software, to build your own spec on top of ours. Nor will copyright be revoked or the documents placed in the public domain. This isn’t that kind of project. Again: A standard with multiple competing variations isn’t a standard
- This project will be led by researchers and people with disabilities, not business
- On the Open & Closed Project’s planned board of directors, the combined total of researchers and people with disabilities will hold the majority. Industry may be represented on the board, but this is a research project, not an industry or marketing project
- You don’t have to like us
- This is not a popularity contest and it has nothing to do with personalities. We’ll win you over with the strength of our work