[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)