A similarly low-res, for different reasons, font: https://simplifier.neocities.org/4x4.html
So the visually impaired would need to learn a new alphabet/representation all to make things readable to the sighted.
I don’t think that suggestion would go over well.
Also it looks like it would be less informative dense for a given area, which seems like a downside as well.
It’s a neat exercise and could make a cool font for an ultra-low resolution display. But this does not seem like a better solution than just printing normal text above/below/on top of the Braille.
The 7 is a glider.
Does anyone know why the "I" (pronounced 'eye') is an upside-down "T"?
I see that "Z" must take what would naturally be an "I" shape on a 3x3 grid, but why not use just a simple vertical line for "I"?
It's fine if the tactile letters intended for the blind don't look the same as the visual ones intended for the sighted; you can associate the whole set in a single day, provided that you're genuinely interested in doing so. (People don't do it because they don't see the point [pun not intended] in doing so.)
The actual issue with Braille, is that letters are often tactically similar. Even tactically, people identify shapes better than absolute positions over a grid; in this sense Braille is flawed by design (why just dots? Why not a mix of dots, curves and straight lines?), and Fakoo's alphabet doesn't solve this.
Interesting, but what about accents or non-English letters such as ø, þ pr ð?
Also, considering that so much is written in Braille, how many people use this?
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
Does ADA legislation in the US allow use of a font like this, or does the legislation explicitly require Braille text?
Proto-Marain! https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/Marain
This is a fun side project. What I'm curious to know is: has any blind person actually tried any of Alexander Fakoó'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 Fakoó, 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