Today, Joe Clark is saying “Captioning Sucks!” with a new website.

Why does it suck?

There’s not enough of it.

• Your complaints are ignored (if you can even manage to file a complaint).
• Captions are hard to read, mostly because of lousy fonts.
• Deaf people settle for less than 100% captioning.
• Broadcasters use the wrong kind of captioning (like scrollup or real-time captioning).
• So-called regulators let broadcasters get away with murder—because regulators and broadcasters play a game of musical chairs and swap positions over time.
• And finally… there are no standards.

Joe’s research project, the Open & Closed Project aims to solve that last problem and Captioning Sucks exists to raise awareness on just one of the issues the Project will address.

Mike Cherim has finally revealed the website he’s been working on as an exemplary implementation site conforming to WCAG 2.0 to be featured by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)—The Law Office of Lainey Feingold. Of particular note is the Accessibility Conformance Statement that gives some insight into the different approach taken by WCAG 2.0 over that of the nine year old WCAG 1.0 guidelines. Congratulations Mike and Lainey Feingold.

Mike Cherim created the Accessible Web Designers group on Facebook a few days back and it’s really taken off with 95 members so far—with more than a few “celebrities” in its ranks. Borrowing the name from Mike’s top-ten group on Ma.gnolia treat this as a cordial invitation to join and further spread the word. Oh, Mike made me an admin so enjoy responsibly

About this time last year Joe Clark launched a micropatronage drive to help pay his way whilst he went about raising funds for his accessibility research project, the Open & Closed Project. About 250 of us sent in donations via PayPal and raised almost $6000 but despite many applications for grants, nothing materialised. You know, with all the money we see being thrown at start-ups again—with companies like Yahoo! and Google involved too—the $7million needed to complete this project is pocket change to them yet it comes with a huge return on investment when considered in terms of impact on people’s lives. Forget the next Facebook or MySpace or whatever the next World-shattering cloned social app will be. Joe might not have approached you directly, but you sure as hell will know about this project. AOL, Google, Microsoft: stop supporting closed-standards and do some good for humankind in a responsible manner. $7million.

This year, Joe is trying a different tack and this time it’s personal. Despite Joe’s misgivings that twice might be once too many, please do get acquainted with phase 2 of the micropatronage and the project’s aims and support Joe however you can.

Technorati Tags: accessibility, captioning, audiodescription, subtitling, dubbing, micropatronage, joeclark, openandclosed

Accessites and the Guild of Accessible Web Designers, of which I’m a member of both, have agreed to co-operate with producing a quarterly “GAWDS Web Accessibility Award”. Accessites will put forward nominations to GAWDS each quarter based on websites that have passed the submissions criteria and then gone on to achieve a “Quality” or higher award.

From the horse’s mouth:

• Accessites and GAWDS Cooperate
• New GAWDS award in partnership with Accessites

Technorati Tags: accessibility, awards, guild of accessible web designers, accessites