Standards
The main purpose of the Open & Closed Project is the development of standards (recommended practices) for captioning, audio description, subtitling, and dubbing.
Our goal is to use research and evidence to document the right way to carry out each of the four fields of accessible media. The key words there are “research and evidence.” We already have a large clipping file and will do further searches of the existing research. When there isn’t any research on a topic, we’ll do it ourselves. And once we’re done, we’ll test our recommendations to make sure they work.
We will take variations into account – Japanese is different from French; analogue TV captioning is different from first-run movie captioning – but within a certain area, there will be one standard and one way to do things. We intend to take into account every variable we can think of. We will write very precise standards with much less room for variation from company to company than you find today. In fact, the goal is for competent practitioners of Open & Closed Project methods to be indistinguishable from one another. When we say “standards,” we mean it.
The foregoing will come as a shock to many practitioners, whose entire businesses rest on the claim that their work is better than everyone else’s. (That usually just means different from and more expensive than everyone else’s.) Those practitioners do not have a research basis to back up their claims.
The foregoing will also come as a shock to practitioners who claim their work is at least as good as everyone else’s, only cheaper. If you want your work to be as good as everyone else’s in actual fact, then everyone has to be doing the same thing.
Do you think we already have standards? In fact, we do not. What passes for standards are actually a simple jotting down of individual preferences. There are no standards based on research and evidence, let alone any such standards that have been tested to prove they work. Not only will we develop standards based on research and evidence, we’ll spend a year testing them to prove they work – and if they don’t, we’ll do whatever it takes to fix them. Once the standards are completed, we will develop training and certification programs.