What constitutes research? Standing in a lab in a white jacket? The best research for testing the readability of something is to read it. Help out by giving it a try yourself. How would Arabic look if you hadn't encountered it before?
Gathering experimental evidence by having many different people from many different demographics read many different things, preferably under controlled conditions. Comparing the resulting statistics to comparable statistics regarding other writing systems. Analyzing the interaction between the human vision system and reading. Probably a dozen other things besides, some of which do indeed involve lab coats.
> How would Arabic look if you hadn't encountered it before?
Probably weird. Distinguishable as a writing script, though. Your point?
Anyway, assuming you're serious:
This script is certainly more compact than the Latin alphabet. It's also completely lacking in things like contrast, visual cues, and optimization for letter frequency. Furthermore, it's factually incorrect that the Latin alphabet was optimized for writing, and totally irrelevant that it was invented thousands of years ago.
Given that we have the Latin alphabet as a well-established and imminently functional existing standard, your argument simply aren't very convincing. Sorry.
> Gathering experimental evidence by having many different people from many different demographics read...
Why don't I get it peer reviewed why I'm at it. Then I can post in on hacker news in 2014.
>> How would Arabic look if you hadn't encountered it before?
> Probably weird. Distinguishable as a writing script, though. Your point?
That you probably would have found many flaws in it to point out, many of them probably valid, in relation to what you are familiar with. You likely wouldn't have given it the time or consideration required to discover the positive points it may have that are discernible when using it in practice, which could outweigh some of the negative points people enjoy focusing on at first contact.
> It's also completely lacking in things like contrast, visual cues
On what are you basing that? Go to dotsies.org and look at the bottom-left of the page, where you can compare the doties paragraph to the text above it. Gradually move your chair back from your screen until you can distinguish nothing. You'll likely see the distinguishing visual cues in the normal text go away before those in the dotsies text, despite it taking up less than half the space.
> your argument simply aren't very convincing. Sorry.
No apology necessary. Though, arguments on both our sides are mostly superfluous, and arguments from those who haven't tried it are partly speculative. The key question is whether it is useful, and that can only be determined by trying it out.
I'd like to hope that the design was influenced and informed by research in cogniotive science, HCI and so forth. And yes real research is in a lab with a white jacket and controlled tests, with hypothesis and broad sample size and statistical signifigance.
20+ years of progress with unicode and thid happens...
Arabic, Sanskrit, and Idu are distinctly non Latin but incredibly easy to discern even to a first time viewer. Like Latin characters, they evolved.
Your sample paragraph of simplistic un-anchored dots is to the human visual system as line noise is to speech. Which is to say, just because some geeks can sync over the phone with a 300 baud modem doesn't mean a whole lot of useful communication will result.
If I scoot my chair back 4 feet from the screen discerning anything is hopeless, despite the font size being somewhat large. Whereas at the same distance much smaller English text is discernible to me.
