What’s new at the Open & Closed Project
- 2007.08.10
- We’ve applied to CanWest for funding. They’re applying to buy Alliance Atlantis. We’re a little punchier than usual this time, pretty much daring them to come up with reasons not to give us half a million bucks.
- 2007.04.27
- We’ve applied to Rogers for funding. They’re applying to buy some of the assets of CHUM in the same transaction in which CTV Globe Media attempts to buy CHUM.
- 2007.04.23
- We have received a letter of support from Telecommunications for the Deaf, Inc. (TDI), which we appreciate.
- 2007.04.05
- We filed an actual intervention with the CRTC to secure funding from CTV’s planned takeover of CHUM. A tad labyrinthine.
- 2007.04.02
- This one’s kind of important: We’ve applied to CTV Globe Media for funding of the Open & Closed Project through social benefits arising from their proposed takeover of CHUM Ltd., or from other sources. This is the big thing we’ve been working on.
- Also: Letters of support from micropatronage donors.
- 2007.02.26
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Finally: With the help of Antonio Cavedoni, our 300-item accessibility bibliography is up.
- 2007.01.15
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You know our major goal is to write a set of standards for captioning, audio description, subtitling, and dubbing, based on research and evidence. Then we’ll test them in the field for a year, publish them, and train and certify practitioners. We’ll also work on better fonts and a universal file format. And all this will be done in the open.
You know all that. But what does it really mean?
- 2007.01.05
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We filed reply comment with the Canadian broadcast regulator, replying, in fact, to about 60 pages of written material and excerpts from 450,000 words of transcripts. The Open & Closed Project solves a lot of the problems people were complaining about there. Interestingly, two educational broadcasters came out in favour of standards; they, and others, will be getting letters. An important fact I was able to assert is that the Open & Closed Project has industry and grassroots support, with some 170 people giving direct contributions and dozens more lending moral support.
I also double-checked with many of the authors of previous support letters. Do they still stand by what they wrote? And how, they said. Other support letters are being solicited.
Conversion of the giant bibliography to HTML is happening more slowly than predicted. We could use some help.
- 2006.12.12
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Lots of improvements:
- Support letters now posted
- New collection of press clippings, including unexpurgated version of AOL Ability interview
- Giant bibliography (over 300 entries) is completely entered into computer and awaits correct conversion to HTML, likely this week
- 2006.12.03
- Added an hCard (the Project supports microformats). You can use it to automatically add our contact information to any device that understands hCard or vCard data.
- Added an explanation about the Project’s name.
- Over at Screenfont, added a full critique of the HDTV caption-fonts specification.
- 2006.11.23
- Improvements to page appearance thanks to Jason Santa Maria (and Antonio Cavedoni, who made it work).
- Substantive updates to the site will be available in the first week of December.
- 2006.11.07
- We launch the site and the Project, at long last, in conjunction with founder Joe Clark’s micropatronage campaign.