Thanks to those who pointed out the Mark Morford writing, Please Never Find a Giant Squid:
The human soul craves mystery. Hell yes it does […] And what's more, if we don't get that nourishment, if we are somehow found lacking in our daily requirement of awe and wonder and oh-my-god-what-the-hell-is-that, well, we tend to flounder and scrape and moan, to start reaching for scraps, for hollow, b.s.-laden facsimiles of true cosmic mystery that tend to smell like organized religion and taste like bad drugs and feel very much like having sex with a large hunk of concrete. Which is to say, not the slightest bit juicy or divine at all.
The giant deep-sea squid is, quite simply, the perfect thing…
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Joe Clark, very well known advocate of accessibility, has started a micropatronage drive to help him stay afloat while he works on getting long-term funding for a new accessibility effort, The Open and Closed Project. About the 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.
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).
We’ll also develop and test improved fonts for captioning and subtitling (already underway). We’ll develop a universal file format.
Joe has put most of his energy into fighting for accessibility so it seems a small thing to help him out. Besides, he has some of the funniest banner ads, one of which I'm adding to my sidebar.
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