Barry Solomon from DeafMac (yes) had a meeting with Apple and AT&T to talk about deaf-related accessibility on the iPhone:

[B]igger font sizes for people with low vision, closed-captioning support, option to make all phone calls go direct to voicemail, making voicemail forwardable as E-mail attachments, iChat, relay-service access, more vibration options/customizable for different applications like ringtones are…. I emphasized that most of those things already existed in certain applications here and there, and would make sense if the same options were offered in all applications…. The bottom line I was telling him that those things need to be available across the board, and he couldn’t dispute this.

We had a good discussion about closed-captioning support. They said they couldn’t know if it would be ported to iPhone after it went live in 10.5 this fall, but said that captioning was one of their priorities, and making [QuickTime] able to read captions was important, so that they could then ask content providers to include captions….

In the nicest possible way I have to call bullshit here for a moment. Yes, Apple announced so-called closed-captioning support in QuickTime, and I’ve been waiting for somebody to figure out what that means. Thus far, nobody has.

• Closed captioning of analogue video signals is transmitted in the vertical blanking interval. .MOV and other digital-video files do not have a VBI – if I’m not mistaken, encoding starts at Line 23, and the VBI ends one field after Line 21, where NTSC captions reside. Is the assumption that captions would be captured and stored in some other format, like QTtext? How are you going to make sure the video file, this other file, and any wrapper files (like SMIL) all make it from your computer to your iPhone?
• Has Apple really understood the variety of captioning formats in use? Just in analogue television, I can think of three (Line 21, “Line 21”/22 PAL, teletext). Digital? There it gets complicated.
• DVD Player ostensibly shows Line 21 captions, but cannot display scrollup captions. (If I could find a disc with pop-on captions, I’d test those. I would expect a failure.) A system that displays only one of three caption types from one system does not “support closed captioning” at all.
• Isn’t there a tiny bit of a font problem? Apple has gotten this wrong before.
• iPhones and iPods don’t have enough screen real estate for out-of-frame captions. I would expect natural superimposed captions. Getting the alignment right is going to be interesting (widescreen vs. fullscreen and proportional vs. monospaced fonts).

I’m sure an established shop like WGBH already has a secret contract to fix this all up. They’re certainly friends.

DeafMac has a number of other posts on the iPhone. It may be interesting to Americans to read that a payment plan that allows nearly unlimited text messages is unavailable on the iPhone. And if Apple could get this thing to work really well with relay services (especially with hearing or voice carryover), think of the convenience.

Of course, since people equate “accessibility” with “blind person using Jaws,” surely none of this matters – and the iPhone, unlike every other screenphone on the market, is flagrantly illegal and a lawsuit waiting to happen.

Where is this structure located?

Cf.

Just how clueless are the kids behind Nonfiction (q.v., q.q.v.)?

The current scuttlebutt, which I take to be accurate, is that these social climbers are trying for a V2.0 in September. This would be after their complete failure to understand the entire concept of off-the-record status, and the structural impossibility of doing the same thing all over again now that such failure of understanding has been exposed.

One more time, kids: A conversation is off the record if and only if agreed upon by all parties beforehand. It cannot come about as the result of a diktat. But what can come about is a real-time witchhunt – as actually happened at Nonfiction V1.0, when the otherwise affable host shut the entire show down until the secret recording agent in our midst was exposed. I had to school these fuckers on their own topic.

Moreover, there seems to be some misunderstanding about what it really means to get up onstage in a crowded room to tell stories. Everyone in the room then knows your story, your name, and what you look like. Just how off-the-record can that be?

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Not only do these greenhorns not know the first thing about what they’re actually trying to do, deep inside the organizers lurks the dream of arts-council grants and legitimacy in the media demimonde they actively court. Could an office and salaries be far behind? In other words, couldn’t Nonfiction be just like Spacing?

ITCHY: Lemonade?

Inside the CBC is the “official” CBC blog, written most of the time by Tod Maffin. The Tea Makers is an unofficial CBC blog pseudonymously written by Ouimet. In this Tea Makers thread, we have evidence that the writer of the official CBC blog is threatening the writer of an unofficial one, something that even CBC management has never attempted.

I’d say that pretty much finishes Inside the CBC.

And if you work at CBC, according to a policy document, ostensibly you will never be permitted to mention your employer on your blog unless your boss approves. In other words, your boss can ixnay your entire blog. I’d say that pretty much finishes blogging at the CBC.

While seated at ClearLeft in Brighton, I wrote the preface for an upcoming book. The plan was to spend a leisurely June failing to earn money but at least working on something “productive,” the rest of that book.

Instead, I have spent every day working on one of two papers I am to present at ATypI Brighton 2007. Yes, Brighton, the acceptable face of England, and yes, two papers. I believe I am the only person presenting twice – once in the main conference and once in TypeTech. The latter paper concerns testing methods for captioning and subtitling fonts. The paper I have been writing concerns TTC subway typography. In essence, I have written the complete history from the inception of the subway in 1954 to present.

I have completed all but small copy-edits of the paper. It runs 13,000 words, has more than 50 illustrations, and includes over 70 citations. I researched original sources dating back to 1968, including all of Paul Arthur’s files at the ROM. The photos were merely a matter of selection, as I now have roughly 1,000 TTC photos and climbing. (I had to print them out to edit them properly; the GraphicConverter Catalog[ue] feature works well for that.) I carried out many custom photo shoots in the subway. I am not quite a member of the 69-station club yet, but not many people have done both the Views – Bay~ and Downs~ – in the very same week.

Readers who have any interest in the first place will be very surprised at what I have learned. At the most minor level, I believe I know where every sign in Arial is located in the entire system. At a major level, I have thoroughly documented the way TTC has approached signage over the last 15 years. I will publish the paper online after I present at the conference. It will have to stay under lock and key until then.

In a rebuke to the expectations of the type field, the paper is in plain, albeit perfect, HTML, not in InDesign with hanging punctuation and ligatures. I believe I have put orders of magnitude more work into this paper than most ATypI speakers will have put into theirs; mostly those will be giant PDFs exported from Keynote. It doesn’t end here: I have another paper to write, which will not be completed by this week’s deadline, and two presentations to create. (Remember, a paper is not a presentation. That will be news to some co-presenters.)

It’s been an extraordinarily burdensome task, but I brought it on myself. It was my idea. I had spoken at ATypI in 2003, because it was at least possible to fly there affordably. Later conferences, in places like Prague, Helsinki, and Lisbon, cost more to fly to than Sydney does. I am assuming I will make it to Brighton. On another day we can discuss my unduly low profile in typography and why some believe I have no bonafides in (not even “love for”) typography.

I have been viewing this endeavour as a literal academic exercise. I am writing academic papers. I enjoy that, as I am keen on research. But I’m not getting paid for it. I get paid for almost nothing I do, because the prevailing impression, even among people who have never met me, is that I shouldn’t. As far as they’re concerned, the system is functioning as designed if I work for free.

After waiting forever despite being one of only two people on the list, the library finally delivered my copy of Canadian Television Today by Bart Beaty and Rebecca Sullivan.

It’s rather blandly typeset, on too wide a measure, in some kind of new recherché typeface I cannot identify. Mieka West took the time to select full ligature activation in InDesign, but nobody took the time to copy-edit the book, which even gets proper names wrong (“Caplan-Savageau”). And while the authors claim to do something most Canadian(-)TV critics will not – discuss the actual shows – they really don’t.

The thesis of the book is that, while Canada officially embraces multiculturalism, the entire dialogue about Canadian TV is really a dialogue about American TV and our reaction to it. Instead of talking more about global coproductions and, in essence, aligning our axis with Europe (Australia and the like are never mentioned), all we talk about is how many Canadian replacements for American networks we license (“America-plus”) and how many raw American signals we keep out of the country (“America-minus”).

(I’m not sure I have that exactly right. The useless index does not state what page those terms appear on, and after looking at every page I can’t find it again in the mass of overly regular type. A name that appears once and is of interest only to her and her mother, Melissa Auf der Mar, is indexed, while another term that appears once and is of interest every year, Super Bowl, is unindexed.)

While Canadian TV commentators want a greater number of highbrow or middlebrow TV shows, which somehow suits their own self-images, those shows are really not very popular, and because of changes in CRTC rules, broadcasters have stopped making them. The cultural elite clamours for TV shows that nobody watches and nobody wants to make. (I wager they don’t watch them, either.) Yet, the authors state, there is very little discussion of the American TV shows shot in Canada, almost all of which are lowbrow.

The Canadian TV the elites want what nobody else does. The elites never talk about the Canadian-made TV we do have. (I wonder, though: It’s OK for intellectuals to watch Battlestar Galactica, right? But never Stargate Atlantis.)

The authors cite Will Straw (“Dilemmas of Definition”):

The essentialist model, which valiantly struggles to produce a list of universal characteristics that succinctly and definitively create the essence of Canada, is rapidly losing ground in the wake of increasing multiculturalism…. The compensatory model is a much more interesting argument. It simply states that what Canadian culture most often provides are those things that other cultures do not…. From this standpoint, Canadian identity is defined by a fervent desire to be not-American…. Richard Collins defines this as the Beethoven–versus–Aaron Spelling dilemma.

The authors mock the CRTC for allowing Al-Jazeera onto Canadian airwaves under conditions they knew nobody could comply with, while eventually allowing the equally biased Fox News on the grounds that it never covers Canada. Except that two weeks after approving the channel’s carriage, there was Ann Coulter insulting us. And it was certainly an odd precedent to approve a channel for Canadians that ostensibly never talks about Canada. Usually when we want to do that, we authorize a parallel service here that becomes a licence to print money. (The authors report that 1,200 people wrote in to support Al-Jazeera’s licensing compared to 500 opposed. If you’re interested in conspiracy theories about Jewish media control, here it’s really true: Jewish lobby groups got their way in effectively excluding an Arab television station.)

The CRTC, moreover, limits the number of “third”-language channels permitted in Canada, and even those that are authorized are nearly impossible to subscribe to unless you live in a big city. Ostensibly we want to limit “foreign” domination of the airwaves. That really means “American,” but sometimes the word is interpreted literally, and other axes are shut out. Unless of course you want to use a grey-market satellite dish, which the Supremes definitively ruled were illegal. Canada is a multicultural country, yet while you may buy any book, record, or movie you wish, you may not watch any network you wish.

Community television stations? Well, they aren’t much good either, since, by insisting they be hyper-local, by definition you preclude the possibility of doing anything local across different cities. Italian-Canadians, to take an example, have to duplicate their shows in every city. Oh, and if you have any training at all you can’t run your own program (a “fetishization of amateurism”).

I suppose if I wanted a link from the Tea Makers, I could summarize the book’s many pages of CBC coverage, chiefly of the 2004 elimination of local newscasts and of The Greatest Canadian. You will relish the book’s lavish evisceration of Ben Mulroney and Canadian Idol.

As I read all that, I kept wondering why The One wasn’t mentioned (aired too late?), and why Strombo’s many failures never seem to stick. No one has prominently noted that Strombo completely sold himself out to host what would become the worst-rated début in American television history. Apart from changing his wardrobe and removing his embedded hardware, George Stroumboulopoulos even agreed to amputate 16 letters from his name and be officially known solely as “George S.” And by all measures (I do mean all), The Hour is just as much a failure.

What passes for celebrities in Canada, like Strombo, are beloved by the Canadian elite who program the CBC and write for the papers. (Or, again like Strombo, they are actually despised by that same group even if they’re too chickenshit to say so.) And these demicelebrities continue to have flourishing careers, sometimes abetted by interviewing each other. Why, just last week, Jian Ghomeshi had a very special, very exclusive sit-down with Don McKellar, whom we scarcely ever hear from or about.

Canadian TV, summed up in a single sentence: “[W]hat Human Cargo offers is the unsmiling, straightforward and sincere version of a myth of Canada that may well be desirable but comes with so much elitist baggage that it needs to be taken down a peg or two by also embracing Trailer Park Boys” – who, from all appearances, do their own captioning.