Your source for “sand & grave” in the 905.

But don’t get any ideas beyond that.

The R and the C don’t match.

Another in a series of postings on CBC captioning (also see the separate page on the topic)

What I do when I find an interesting blogger – and how very pedestrian I feel writing that, as “blog” remains an ugly word – is to read his entire archives. They’re almost always boys, except when they are or are not, as with A. Ouimet of the Tea Makers, the in-house CBC anonybloggeur(se) (q.v.).

I had already read everything at Tea Makers as it was freshly written. There were, and still are, days when I checked it twice just to be one up on my RSS. Yesterday I decided to reread the archives. (I do indeed “have that much time on my hands”; it’s called research, and it’s one of the things I do so you don’t have to.)

I’ve been thinking for a long time – since well before my three-year, and still ongoing, mission to document “CBC fuckups,” as Ouimet calls them – why the fuck I care about these fuckups. [continue with: Reasons to care →]

Through the advice of my esteemed colleague Derek Featherstone, I finally learn the true cost of having a blog:

Start a blog: I can attribute at least six figures of income to my blog (that doesn’t include the two decimal places!). Can you afford not to try it for yourself?

I suppose that means I have forgone six figures of income from my blog. We now have evidence of the cost penalty incurred when one fails to be a jovial, matey former rugger and father of three. (If you think I’m being hard on Derek, knock it off. I have discussed this conundrum with him already. He isn’t the one who needs shoring up.)

The unmarried sarcastic teetotaling veganist homosexualist “entrepreneur” can expect to lose six figures of income over the lifetime of his blog, particularly if prone to swearing, criticism, and other forms of unmitigated gall honesty. Yet is it not unexpected, at the very least, for Molly to claim that no harm befalls her business the more personal her blog becomes? Perhaps this is not about honesty in blogs but the way unpopularity survives from one medium to another.

Can you afford not to try being yourself?

I see these trucks several times a week but can never manage to shoot them. Note the morally-correct Palatino gussied up with outline (perhaps more like inline or contour, two categories ethnically cleansed by PostScript overregularization).

Ofcom, the U.K. broadcast regulator (whose office I kept walking by while in London for @media), commissioned a review of the literature (PDF) concerning captioning (as ever, errantly mislabelled as “subtitling”), audio description, and sign language. Itself a useful contribution, the lit review, published in March, nonetheless swallowed whole the total bullshit about Tiresias Screenfont and the “research” that claims to justify it as a font for digital captioning.

Tiresias Screenfont is, as you’ll recall, the homely sansserif font that costs up to $17,500 but doesn’t have an italic.

Here’s what the literature review said:

The Tiresias screenfont [sic] was carefully evaluated using people with a variety of visual and hearing impairments by RNIB and found to be useful. In its development, design considerations included the character shape, character weight (line thickness), intercharacter spacing, compatibility (in terms of maximum type size) with aspect-ratio switching, and character shapes that are difficult to distinguish. It has been adopted by the U.K. Digital Television Group as the standard font for interactive television and subtitling [sic].

The typeface absolutely was not “carefully evaluated.” I have now petitioned Ofcom to commission original research into the needs of captioning typography in the U.K.; to design new fonts if required; and to licence them for free, with the added possibility of assigning them an open-source licence.

In my cover letter, I was careful to specify that I was not trying to line myself up for such a research contract. The U.K. has one highly qualified researcher, and several more are at work in other countries. We gotta stop acting like Any Old Font Will Do for Deaf People, especially when the “research” backing it up pretty much only tested grannies with glasses. Junk science has got to stop someday.