Re: German »ß«

On 2013-02-17, Philippe Verdy <verdy_p_at_wanadoo.fr> wrote:
> I was not citing empirical results but things that are regulated by legislation.

No you weren't - you were making explicit claims that lowercase is
harder to read than capitals. You said nothing about regulation.

> And your existing empirical results are just nfomal tests ignoring
> important parts of the population of drivers, notably:

Since you aren't even aware of the existence of these reports (the
Anderson and Worboys reports in the UK, and equivalents in the US and
Germany) , it's quite impressive that you know what's in them.
As one can read, the recent enforced change in the U.S. to lower-case
placenames on all signs is significantly driven by the increasing
number of elderly drivers with poorer sight.
The changes in the U.S. follow a program of research (for example by
Philip Garvey, a psychologist of vision) commissioned by the agencies
on how to make signs more readable for these drivers, amongst others.

> compensated by sufficient contrast (lowercase letters do not contrast
> enough, because their strokes are too near of each other)

I think perhaps you should look at some letter forms, particularly in
the typefaces used for traffic signs.

> - the effect of presbytia on vision of aging population : here again
> the size of letters does matter (look at those phones sold to ages

Road signs are usually not in front of one's nose!

> In all these cases, you need less density of strokes, and capital
> letters are better constrasting.

Could you point to anyone who has found this to be true in reality?

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