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I love the way it teaches you, but the other comments are correct. It doesn't really make sense to optimize for screen space like this. However, the teaching

by vokep 8y ago

I love the way it teaches you, but the other comments are correct. It doesn't really make sense to optimize for screen space like this. However, the teaching style along with a symbol alphabet that IS trying to solve for better legibility (without necessarily any allegiance to dyslexic fonts), could be pretty interesting. In middle school when bored once I made my own symbolic alphabet, I found it really is extremely easy to learn a new symbol set for language you already know, so, changing away from the traditional symbols isn't even that massive of an endeavor. I think they did do an OK job with using screen space well, but at the cost of legibility to a degree. That said, the more I think on it, maybe the author did too. Sure, individual letters aren't as legible, but the point is almost more that words become single characters, more like Mandarin. If those characters are legible, than it doesn't matter that the individual letters are not. If you don't know a word, you're already going to be individually inspecting the letters. (of course, it will still be mildly more difficult with dotsies)

retreatguru 8y ago
This was my favourite aspect of dotsies: that words began to have familiar shapes. I stopped needing to parse certain words because their shape was so unique and memorable. At the same time it would be interesting to see it implemented based on letter frequency rather than order in the alphabet. It was great fun to read!
- Ndymium 8y ago
  Isn't that true for "normal" text too? Don't we skim text usually pretty quickly based on how the words look like, instead of reading every letter one by one?
  - p1esk 8y ago
    Same is true for morse code sound patterns.
trogdoro 8y ago
> It doesn't really make sense to optimize for screen space like this. However, the teaching style along with a symbol alphabet that IS trying to solve for better legibility ... Optimizing for legibility as opposed to screen space is a distinction that isn't very meaningful in practice. Because if words aren't legible enough, people increase the font size until they are. If something is extremely legible (like latin letters at a 40pt font size) people will naturally tend to decrease the size. So screen space and legibility are largely different labels for the same concept. With some wiggle room but not that much.

by vokep 8y ago

retreatguru 8y ago

This was my favourite aspect of dotsies: that words began to have familiar shapes. I stopped needing to parse certain words because their shape was so unique and memorable. At the same time it would be interesting to see it implemented based on letter frequency rather than order in the alphabet. It was great fun to read!

Ndymium 8y ago
Isn't that true for "normal" text too? Don't we skim text usually pretty quickly based on how the words look like, instead of reading every letter one by one?
- p1esk 8y ago
  Same is true for morse code sound patterns.

trogdoro 8y ago

> It doesn't really make sense to optimize for screen space like this. However, the teaching style along with a symbol alphabet that IS trying to solve for better legibility ... Optimizing for legibility as opposed to screen space is a distinction that isn't very meaningful in practice. Because if words aren't legible enough, people increase the font size until they are. If something is extremely legible (like latin letters at a 40pt font size) people will naturally tend to decrease the size. So screen space and legibility are largely different labels for the same concept. With some wiggle room but not that much.