Today, Joe Clark launches an appeal for supporters to donate small amounts of cash to start up a research project. Known as micropatronage, Joe is seeking to raise some capital to see him over for four months whilst he raises the $7 million Canadian for an accessibility research project he has dubbed (no pun intended) “The Open & Closed Project”.

Our main goal is to write a set of standards for the four fields of accessible media — captioning, audio description, subtitling, and dubbing. We'll develop those standards through research and evidence-gathering. Where research or evidence is missing on a certain topic, we'll carry it out ourselves.

Significantly, Joe will take this set of standards further:

We'll test the finished standards for a year in the real world and publish them. (You'll be able to download them for free or buy them in several formats.) Then we'll develop training and certification programs for practitioners. It will finally be possible to become a certified captioner (or audio describer or subtitler or dubbing artist).

Joe is very passionate about this subject so I wish him all the best with this venture.

Ian Lloyd, he of many hats has been rather busy lately and today I hope he’s putting his feet up and enjoying the day with a chilled beverage of choice. A big round of applause and congratulations for his just-released SitePoint book entitled “Build Your Own Website the Right Way Using HTML and CSS“.

It’s a book for the absolute beginner who wants to do things properly, who wants to become truly skilled, rather than throw together a website for the sake of having one. Does that sound like what you’re after?

SitePoint will shortly have some preview chapters in pdf but the publicity machine is ahead of the game at the moment, so check Ian’s blog or SitePoint regularly for availability.

And if you go to a bricks-and-mortar book store? Be sure to pester the buyer that this is the book to stock for beginners.

No article this week from myself but head over to Mike Cherim’s Beast Blog for a great article on the proper use of the alt attribute instead.