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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.