Re: German »ß«

I was not citing empirical results but things that are regulated by legislation.
And your existing empirical results are just nfomal tests ignoring
important parts of the population of drivers, notably:
- those driving by night : the effet of some visual defects like
asygmatism, which is only partially corrected and which can only be
compensated by sufficient contrast (lowercase letters do not contrast
enough, because their strokes are too near of each other)
- the effect of presbytia on vision of aging population : here again
the size of letters does matter (look at those phones sold to ages
people: most of them are completely unable to use modern smartphones
for example, they are unreadable even with the best visual
correction), even if they wear "progressive glasses", they have a
reduced angle of good focusing, and if letters are too small, they
need to stop looking at the road to fix the displays on roads for
longer time. Every people above the age of 40 starts suffering this
visual defficiency where adaptation to vision depth is more difficult
and longer. larger letters that can be read easily even before there's
a full focus helps reducing the adaptation time.
- also by night, the effect of tireness also slows down the visual
adaptation and reduuces the angle of good focusing.
In all these cases, you need less density of strokes, and capital
letters are better constrasting.
Of course there are other factors like the effective constrast of
colors used on those displays, the negative impact of too narrow
fonts, insufficient intercharacter advance gaps, and insufficient
boldness.
Note that a perfect 10/10 vision (or better) is not mandatory to
drive, there are legal minimums where people with only 8/10 can
legally drive (and other visual defects are NOT tested at all, notably
the various forms of color blindness (mot cases being full or partial
deuteranopia, affecting about 1 on 6-8 male human in Europe, depending
on test methods : this is definitely not a small population).

2013/2/17 Asmus Freytag <asmusf_at_ix.netcom.com>:
> On 2/16/2013 11:19 PM, Julian Bradfield wrote:
>
> On 2013-02-17, Philippe Verdy <verdy_p_at_wanadoo.fr> wrote:
>
> True lowercase letters are causing problems on road sign indicators on
> roads with high speed : they are hard to read and if the driver has to
> look at them for one more second, he does not look at the road.
>
> AS I SAID, empirical evaluation by those who had good cause to care
> about the issue indicates the opposite, that people take longer to
> read all caps (as is also the case in normal text).
> This evaluation was done specifically for high speed roads. It
> included live testing on one motorway.
>
> Would not be the first time that Mr. Verdy's statements are in an
> interesting relation to empirically determined results.
>
> :)
>
> A./
Received on Sun Feb 17 2013 - 04:50:57 CST