AOL Ability interview
What follows is the original text from an AOL Ability interview conducted in December 2006. The published version was rather expurgated.
- Please give us an overview of the Open & Closed Project and how people can help.
Well, our main goal is to write standards for the Big Four accessibility techniques, namely captioning and subtitling (two separate things), audio description, and dubbing. We’re gonna do this based on research and evidence rather than simply writing down whatever we feel like, which is the rule at the moment.
If you’ve spent any time watching captioned TV (just as an example), then you know there are as many ways to caption a show as there are captioners. That has to change. It shouldn’t be up to the viewer to relearn how to watch and understand every new program. People with disabilities deserve and require clear and factual standards for the delivery of their accessibility needs. Complaining about poor quality after the fact has been proven not to work. What needs fixing is the source.
I emphasize that this is an exercise based on research. Obviously we don’t have to research everything – you don’t need to conduct a study to explain why captions and subtitles should use correct spellings, for example. But a lot of issues are unexplored in the four fields of accessibility, and we intend to explore them. This is not a question of writing down what I or anyone else feels like. I just run the show; I don’t determine the outcome of the research. (And this isn’t a one-man operation. I have collaborators that haven’t been announced yet.)
Then, once we’re done that, we’re actually going to beta-test the standards in the wild for a full year. Our research may tell us one thing, but it may not work in practice. After that, we’ll publish the standards, which will be downloadable for free or purchasable in various physical formats, and set up training and certification programs for practitioners.
We’re also gonna do a couple of other things, like design and test much better fonts for captions and subtitles and take another stab at a universal file format, which has been attempted before with no success.
People can help just by expressing support. Really, it’s that simple. We’re especially concerned to receive support from broadcasters, service providers, and anyone else who produces material that ends up being made accessible or who makes it accessible. It’s your industries we’re trying to improve.
- What positive outcomes do you envisage the project will provide for people with disabilities?
The big benefit is that we will take away one thing that makes your life suck. We will single-handedly undercut, if not exactly eliminate, crappy captioning, second-rate subtitling, awful audio description, and dreadful dubbing. You the viewer can then insist – to broadcasters, regulators, and the like – that all the accessibility they use be Open & Closed–certified.
Our font project will make captions and subtitles easier to read. If you have any trouble reading them already, then (a) get your eyes checked and (b) sit closer to the screen. (Those are two known causes of reading difficulty in captioning.) If that still doesn’t work, it’s probably because the fonts are terrible. And we’re gonna fix that.
The downside is that we have no way to make our standards or the use of our fonts mandatory. That will be up to other people and other groups. But there will at least be something rational, and really well tested, to use as a requirement.
- What is your motivation for this project?
I got sick of crappy captioning and even worse audio description and I decided to do something about it. But I have the biggest library of accessibility research in Canada – the bibliography for which is going online in December – and I knew that this was not simply a question of having me come in and tell people what to do, like sahibs talking down to Indians. I know a lot, but I don’t know everything. Nobody does. But the goal is to learn as much as can be learned in order to fix the problem of poor-quality accessibility.
- Have you tried to gain monetary support from government, NGOs, business?
I don’t really want government money per se, though government-funded research programs that support projects based on peer review are fine. NGOs ain’t got no money; the best I could get would be moral support. And business? Yeah, I want them to fund my whole project. It’ll cost them less in the long run. They’ll finally be getting proven value for money from their suppliers. Besides, a single human-rights complaint can ruin your whole day.