Application to CanWest for funding of the Open & Closed Project
Because you need us as much as we need you
This is an application for funding of the Open & Closed Project from tangible social benefits flowing from the proposed CanWest acquisition of Alliance Atlantis or from other sources. CanWest has known about the Project since 2005, and it’s time to get serious about putting a trivial amount of money into a project that will pay off later.
We’ve got a pretty simple proposition:
- We’re looking for funding to do research and audience testing to standardize captioning, audio description, subtitling, and dubbing.
- CanWest is facing a real problem with quality of captioning (in particular) on all its current TV channels, and on all the channels it will also own with if the acquisition goes through.
- One human-rights complaint can ruin your whole day. (For CanWest, it already has.)
- If you think viewers with disabilities really are equal to viewers without, then blind or deaf viewers require the same level of quality as everyone else.
- An organization whose executives have striven for years to establish a human-rights museum can hardly settle for accessibility provided by the lowest bidder.
The only way to achieve (e)quality is to research and test a set of standards. We’re the only people who want to do that, or are even remotely capable of it. We’re independent, nonprofit, and extremely well supported by industry and the grassroots. And we’re not asking for a ton of money.
What we’re going to do
We’re going to solve the problem of lousy captioning. And lousy audio description. And lousy subtitling and dubbing.
We’re going to do that by writing standards for those four fields. And unlike the CAB and broadcasters, we aren’t going to write down our current practices and pass them off as a standard. (We couldn’t. We aren’t in that business. We’re independent.) Instead, we’re going to develop standards based on research and evidence. If the research is not available, we’ll do it ourselves. If the evidence is not available, we’ll get it ourselves.
We’ll write the spec, in an open process to which anyone may contribute, and we’ll spend a year testing the standard in the real world to make sure it works. (That process will be open to public comment, too.) After the standards are finalized, we’ll develop training and certification procedures for practitioners. It will finally be possible to become a certified captioner, for example.
And once we’re done, there won’t be 20 kinds of accessibility from 20 different providers. Everyone who signs on to the standard will do their work in exactly the same way, with natural variations for medium (TV is different from film) and language (English differs from French). You the viewer won’t have to relearn how to watch TV with every program and commercial.
For a broadcaster, you’ll actually know for sure you’re getting good work from qualified people as opposed to whatever work comes out of the lowest bidder’s shop. This kind of assurance of money well spent is something CanWest sorely needs.
This isn’t just about captioning
No matter how hard we try, we cannot get people to understand that we will work on all four fields of accessible media – audio description, dubbing, subtitling, and, yes, captioning. We are not “writing a captioning standard,” nor are we only ever talking about captioning, nor should you think either of those things.
Quantity vs. quality
On the topic of captioning (only one of several topics the Project will address), CanWest is known to shop on price. The result is poor-quality and unstandardized captioning, done entirely in scrollup in capital letters – the sort of captioning that seems OK to someone who doesn’t actually watch captioning, or like it.
Low-quality captioning is a magnet for human-rights complaints. So is an absence of audio description; one blind group has already publicly stated it is preparing complaints against broadcasters on the topic of audio description.
How might you head that off at the pass? Well, increasing quantity to 100% isn’t going to do it. (100% is never really 100%, either; there’s always an exemption, like overnight programming, or outside commercials, or promos and bumpers, or anything you don’t feel like captioning.) This time you’ll be dealing with complaints not merely about how much accessibility there is but how good it is. In captioning as it stands now, quality is where CanWest would lose right away.
And while the company economizes on captioning, it proposes to spend a billion bucks buying a rival broadcaster. People with disabilities, and others, will notice that disparity and may be incensed enough do something about it.
Now, if CanWest were to support the independent, nonprofit development of standards for captioning, audio description, subtitling, and dubbing, and, in the interim, ceased certain practices that were known to be harmful, maybe those human-rights complaints wouldn’t even be filed. Or you’d negotiate a much more favourable settlement.
CanWest has a quality problem
CanWest channels are never where a viewer goes first and foremost for quality. The company has a decades-long reputation for pinching pennies (particularly in Canadian programming) – and, like CTV, CanWest’s fortunes are based on the simulcasting of American shows.
Things really aren’t much better in captioning, where CanWest hires a low-quality service provider who never found a program that couldn’t be captioned in scrollup – including fictional narrative programming, a genre that is impossible to understand in scrollup. CanWest wastes money recaptioning already-captioned programs. Alliance Atlantis recently decided to caption every single show in scrollup (in a rather eccentric manner at that), and brilliantly recaptions programming with up to four existing sets of pop-on captions, like Alien.
Captioners will always tell you their work is the best. They don’t know the difference, and they can’t prove it anyway.
Things are not as bad on the audio-description front, where CanWest conducted a test of competing providers and didn’t sign on with the cheapest one. But CanWest’s main provider of audio description, Galaviz & Hauber Productions, not only supports the Open & Closed Project but put that support in writing. That should tell you something.
Absence of complaints explains nothing
We previously applied for funding, and the response from Charlotte Bell answered a set of questions we did not ask. Global, she told our lawyer, is “currently satisfied with the captioning services we provide... and are pleased to say that we have not received any complaints on the quality of this service for well over a year.” We never asked whether or not Global was “satisfied” with its captioning, which we take to mean “satisfied with how cheap it is.”
More importantly, absence of complaints means nothing. As the Canadian Association of the Deaf and we have been explaining for years, it is virtually impossible to file a complaint about captioning. You’re lying on the couch at 10:30 at night, the caption has already disappeared, there is barely any way to make a sensible note about a caption problem, and broadcasters make it difficult to contact them. (How does a deaf person call master control – at an unlisted voice number somewhere out on the Prairies – at 10:30 PM?)
Things are much worse for blind people, who must additionally deal with CanWest’s 1997-era, standards-noncompliant, and provably inaccessible Web sites.
People don’t file complaints because doing so borders on impossible. Viewers have very few options – one of which, the human-rights complaint, Global has already “lost.” CanWest settled a human-rights complaint with Henry Vlug in 2004. CanWest presented the settlement as an agreement to provide 100% captioning on Global and CH.
In fact, the settlement really calls for 100% captioning of whatever CanWest feels like captioning, so that programming like commercials and bumpers was deemed impossible to caption and goes to air with no captions. Oddly enough, CBC manages to caption commercials and bumpers, so it is clearly possible. And the settlement did not touch any other CanWest channels, let alone anything run by Alliance Atlantis.
In any event, a settlement that provides for near-100% captioning is equivalent to CanWest’s losing the complaint. CanWest has left itself open to further complaints concerning captioning quality and concerning audio description. (All broadcasters in Canada, moreover, are sitting ducks for human-rights complaints about accessibility of Web sites.)
Recall that CanWest’s executives have worked diligently for years to extract federal funding for a human-rights museum. But CanWest had to settle a human-rights complaint. If the company wishes to avoid making a mockery of its officers’ claimed commitment to human rights, it’s time to do something real.
We expect that human-rights complaints could be avoided by supporting independent research into what quality captioning and description actually means.
Paradoxically, CanWest views captioning as a hallmark of quality
In its response to deficiencies dated 2007.06.01, CanWest discusses the disbursement of tangible-benefits funding to Hot Docs and states that its “reference to closed captioning is used merely as an example of the many elements that contribute to achieving a quality finished product.” Since only closed captioning is mentioned, we assume this refers solely to broadcast or home-video documentaries and not first-run documentaries presented in a cinema.
There is no way to evaluate quality of captioning at present because there is no standard. Knowledgeable people can tell you what isn’t quality captioning (all-upper-case typesetting, reliance on scrollup captioning for everything, zero-blinkrate pop-on captions), but it is not known what quality captioning is. And captioning is only one-fourth of the accessibility problem.
If CanWest meant its response seriously and not as some kind of blandishment, it’s time to step up to the plate and fund basic research and testing into what quality actually means.
CanWest acts as though industry improvements should simply be handed to them
In its response, dated 2007.03.08, to NBRS’s misguided application for an ironically named Accessible Channel, CanWest noted NBRS’s claims of vapourware software that would permit near-live description, then pretty much demanded that such software be handed over to CanWest as of right (“made available on equitable terms”).
Let’s accept for the moment that NBRS has no software that permits near-live description, nor, with its discernible skillset and staff, is it remotely likely to develop such software at any time between now and the heat death of the universe. Nonetheless, CanWest’s attitude is all wrong.
CanWest should not be supporting proprietary software or standards. It should support the independent development of published standards that are freely licensable to all interested parties, as we propose to do. The company needs to recognize that research costs money and, if it wants to benefit from that research, it has to put up some of that money.
The product of other people’s research is not something to be handed over to CanWest. Should CanWest-owned programs simply be handed over to whomever might save a penny by having them?
Let Hot Docs keep its funding, but fund us, too
We simply do not see how the funding for Hot Docs makes any sense at all as a tangible social benefit in this transaction. Nonetheless, we are not proposing that such funding be cancelled, reduced, or hindered in any way. It merely goes to show that CanWest has tons of money to throw around.
And we want some of it.
Our entire project has a projected budget of $7 million tops. We need a puny half-million to get started, and that’s how much we’re asking for. In a billion-dollar purchase with hundreds of millions in social benefits, we would be interested in hearing reasons why our widely-supported research project isn’t worth half a million bucks. We would not expect to hear any claims that captioning, audio description, subtitling, and dubbing are working fine across the world and do not need research and testing.
We don’t do backroom deals
We did not apply to CanWest for funding between the public announcement of its acquisition of Alliance and the CRTC’s release of documents. We don’t do backroom deals. We know that everybody else in the industry, and the CRTC, all do. But we don’t.
We apply for money out in the open in the context of a public process. We apply before the closing date of that process. As such, our application is in no way “late.” We assume that CanWest would not bother to make the claim that, since we didn’t swing a backroom deal before publication of documents, our worthy and well-supported research project should not be funded. In other words, a conglomerate that really pushes the envelope with its licence restrictions (viz TVTropolis) is not in much of a position to reject us on a technicality.
A way to show corporate responsibility
At any rate, it is time to take accessibility seriously. We know CanWest thinks takes accessibility seriously already, but actions speak louder than words, and in this case, a bit of funding can speak even louder. CanWest and Alliance networks and stations still have a great deal of uncaptioned programming and an immense amount of poorly-captioned programming. Barely anything is described for the blind.
Taking accessibility seriously does not mean hiring the lowest bidder. Really, in 2007, it doesn’t. It means taking captioning and description, for example, as seriously as picture and sound, since captions and descriptions are picture and sound for viewers with disabilities. Picture and sound are rather important to CanWest and CHUM – look at the investment in HDTV. Can we carry that concern for high quality to its ultimate end? Can we be so concerned with quality that we want to pay for outside research to make sure the entire industry is doing it right?
The Open & Closed Project has massive support
The Open & Closed Project has been in the works for five years and has attracted massive support.
- Broadcasters, producers, software houses, and service providers from four countries wrote letters of support.
- We are beginning to attract letters of support from organizations representing people with disabilities, like TDI.
- Some 215 people, including people with disabilities, contributed small sums in a micropatronage project. The goal was to underwrite the task of fundraising for the Project itself. To say that another way, 215 people put their own money where their mouths are and supported the Project.
- And dozens of those people wrote personal support letters in favour of the project.
Importantly, nobody has come out in opposition. We rather doubt CanWest will dare to be the first.
A research project has to have researchers lined up, and we do. We have a verbal cooperation agreement with the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre at the University of Toronto. We already have an actual scientific methodologist on board. We know other researchers in related fields, like psychology of reading, which is somewhat important when two of the four fields involve written words. These researchers can be expected to stay loyal to us. We’re the only game in town.
We’ve got this pretty much all sewn up. What we need now is money, and not a lot of it.
Budget
Detailed budgets are available for confidential review. We need $500,000 for Year 1 and $7 million for the entire five- to seven-year project. We’re applying for a measly half-million.
Funding mechanisms
We see two mechanisms by which CanWest could fund the Open & Closed Project.
- Social benefits arising from the acquisition of Alliance Atlantis
- Paying a pittance for research is pretty much a no-brainer. Really, we’d love to hear reasons why a massively-supported research project isn’t worth a pittance of money.
- Fund us anyway
- The Project deserves funding on its merits. We submit that CanWest will receive excellent value for money at minimal cost – through better quality of work and protection from human-rights complaints – by funding the Project’s first-year operations out of corporate general revenue.
An idea whose time has come
It’s time for the entire industry to get serious about true accessibility for people with disabilities – not captioning from the lowest bidder, not audio description from untrained companies, but researched and tested standards that apply across the board. It’s the only way to genuinely serve viewers with disabilities, it’s the only rational insulation against human-rights complaints and litigation, and it’s the only way a corporation like CanWest can be sure it’s getting its money’s worth.