[HN Gopher] The Fakoo Alphabet
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       The Fakoo Alphabet
        
       Author : sings
       Score  : 31 points
       Date   : 2022-10-05 07:12 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (omniglot.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (omniglot.com)
        
       | gauddasa wrote:
       | Many years ago, I had tried developing a font style with each
       | glyph resembling a blade of grass. The constraints were strongly
       | enforced, so the optimized glyphs no longer resemble the original
       | shapes. https://imgur.com/a/8jTf7yn
        
       | tdeck wrote:
       | This is a fun side project. What I'm curious to know is: has any
       | blind person actually tried any of Alexander Fakoo's scripts?
       | 
       | The reason I'm curious is that there's something funny that
       | happens when sighted people create tactile technologies for the
       | blind: they often don't consult with blind people at all. There's
       | something appealing about the idea of theoretically assistive
       | technology that leads to very impractical systems like Boston
       | Line Type [1] or "braille displays" that have only one single
       | character, that's 10x the normal size. It's easy to assume that
       | if you can technically feel something then that's sufficient for
       | blind people, but the history of blind writing systems shows us
       | that's not enough.
       | 
       | This particular idea seems more promising than other efforts
       | (e.g. Moon), because bumps seem to be easier to feel than shaped
       | figures. It can also be written using a regular slate and stylus.
       | However, modern Braille [2] is full of contractions to reduce the
       | number of characters, and even then braille books are massive and
       | heavy compared to their print counterparts. Doubling the width of
       | individual letters and forgoing contractions really limits the
       | utility to very small snippets of text, and learning an entirely
       | new alphabet just for that doesn't seem very practical.
       | 
       | The author's website [3] is full of promises that "anyone" can
       | read the writing system, but it also says "Developer is Alexander
       | Fakoo, who has learned to read the Braille Writing optically".
       | That's great, but sight-reading Braille is a whole different
       | medium from tactile reading. Personally, I used to be able to
       | read grade 1 braille by sight, but could never read by touch.
       | 
       | [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_line_letter
       | 
       | [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Braille
       | 
       | [3]: https://fakoo.de/en/fakoo.html
        
       | smcameron wrote:
       | The 7 is a glider.
        
       | avmich wrote:
       | A similarly low-res, for different reasons, font:
       | https://simplifier.neocities.org/4x4.html
        
       | yodon wrote:
       | Does ADA legislation in the US allow use of a font like this, or
       | does the legislation explicitly require Braille text?
        
       | rrwo wrote:
       | Interesting, but what about accents or non-English letters such
       | as o, th pr d?
       | 
       | Also, considering that so much is written in Braille, how many
       | people use this?
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2022-10-07 23:00 UTC)