About this time last year Joe Clark launched a micropatronage drive to help pay his way whilst he went about raising funds for his accessibility research project, the Open & Closed Project. About 250 of us sent in donations via PayPal and raised almost $6000 but despite many applications for grants, nothing materialised. You know, with all the money we see being thrown at start-ups again—with companies like Yahoo! and Google involved too—the $7million needed to complete this project is pocket change to them yet it comes with a huge return on investment when considered in terms of impact on people’s lives. Forget the next Facebook or MySpace or whatever the next World-shattering cloned social app will be. Joe might not have approached you directly, but you sure as hell will know about this project. AOL, Google, Microsoft: stop supporting closed-standards and do some good for humankind in a responsible manner. $7million.

This year, Joe is trying a different tack and this time it’s personal. Despite Joe’s misgivings that twice might be once too many, please do get acquainted with phase 2 of the micropatronage and the project’s aims and support Joe however you can.

Technorati Tags: accessibility, captioning, audiodescription, subtitling, dubbing, micropatronage, joeclark, openandclosed