The product of weeks of effort, today I launch a micropatronage drive. You can subsidize me while I fundraise for an accessibility research project. The Open & Closed Project, which has been publicly discussed but has remained under the radar, will use research and evidence to write standards for captioning, audio description, subtitling, and dubbing. (It’s only tangentially related to Web accessibility. This isn’t WCAG or the WCAG Samurai.)
With the help of Antonio Cavedoni, we produced some rather clever ad banners you may use.
(Donating money isn’t the only course of action. In fact, there are many zero-cost options, including the banner ads; plugging the project on your site; submitting it to Digg or moral equivalent; and thinking salutary thoughts.)
Getting the Open & Closed Project site up and running was a nightmare. I cloned the Leslieville look, and then Antonio, Roger Johansson, and I spent days trying to get a skip-navigation link not to screw up completely in IE6. Eventually I would give up and just remove it.
Despite the four-year gestation of the Project, these are still early days, and much remains to be done. But in the meantime, the micropatronage drive gives my supporters the chance to register a vote of confidence in me.