Training & certification
A set of standards for captioning, audio description, subtitling, and dubbing will not be of much help if practitioners don’t know how to use them. For that reason, one of the Open & Closed Project’s goals is to develop training and certification programs.
Once the Open & Closed Project standards (recommended practices) are completed, they will be field-tested for a year to prove they actually work, with any necessary changes made. (We really will change whatever needs to be changed.) At that point, we will develop training programs for use around the world. While the Open & Closed Project may do some training of practitioners, we expect that we will prefer to train the trainers so that many organizations, schools, and other bodies can carry out local training. (One or two training programs are already in place around the world, mostly concerned with subtitling, or, in one case, “monolingual” subtitling or captioning. Their training materials, however, were not developed in an open process, based on research and evidence, and field-tested. Ours will be.)
At the end of a training program, successful participants will receive a certificate that demonstrates mastery of Open & Closed Project standards. At that point, it will finally be possible to become a certified practitioner of captioning, audio description, subtitling, or dubbing. Viewers can lobby broadcasters, studios, producers, and others to hire only certified staff. Those same organizations can adopt an across-the-board requirement that vendors have certification. Regulators can impose a certification requirement where necessary.
From a well-researched set of standards to full field testing to training and certification, the Open & Closed Project intends to solve the entire problem of unstandardized accessibility.