Dotsies (2012)

One advantage of regular letters compared to this is that it's pretty easy to tell that even a fairly mangled A is still an A; a word written in dotsies loses a lot of its legibility as soon as it's not displayed in fairly large pixels across a very clear background. Viewing things at an angle? While it moves by? On a dirty or wet piece of paper? Forget about it.

It's a super fun idea, though. I would 100% put this in the background, or even the foreground, of some future scifi scape.

I like the idea of users being able to choose the font they prefer to read in. It's not very hard to do: you could configure your browser and your code editor and maybe Kindle and be able to read in the new font 90% of the time.

Can anyone who uses https://www.dyslexiefont.com/ comment on how hard it is to have it everywhere?

But Dotsies seems to be solving the wrong problem: using the fewest pixels. I think the right problem is being able to skim large amounts of text quickly, for which typical fonts are pretty good. You can find whether there are any numbers on a page, for instance, in well under a second.

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)

How easy it would be to "read" Braille visually, like Dotsies? I imagine they are optimized for different uses, no?

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