On Tue, Aug 20, 2019 at 03:17 PM, Bill Tessore wrote:

Isn’t it interesting to note that for those that read with synthesizers, and/or braille, this is a non-issue?

Indeed.  Hence the reason I made clear that I was referring to human reading via the sensory modality of vision.

Machine reading is an entirely different thing, and since any white space after a period indicates it's a full stop that's all a "reading machine" needs in most cases to know what's what.  When you're reading "by eye" the size of the gap between sentences can be just as important as the presence of the punctuation mark itself.

The sensory modality being used, and how its been trained, is critical.  I have tried to explain to those who have been reading Braille as the only thing they've ever read that picking the skill up in adulthood by someone who's been sighted for most of their life is just not going to happen.   Our tactile modality has not ever been trained for the kind of discrimination necessary for fluent dot identification on a Braille page, and it's hellishly difficult to acquire if one can even acquire it at all.

How our individual sensory palettes are trained from the moment we start using them, and whether we ever had and lost any of them, makes a huge difference in how we actually can and do use them.   My dear friend used to do a sort of "parlor trick" as far as those of us who are sighted were concerned when we were driving her around our small town.  She could (and would) very often tell you what corner you were on when you stopped at a stop light no matter how it was that you came to be at that spot.  She had trained herself to listen to the characteristic sounds of those intersections and the businesses that surrounded them.   It floored those of us who could see, simply because we cannot do that because we never needed to develop the skill - looking around is faster and easier.   Were I to lose my vision tomorrow I doubt that I could ever cultivate that level of skill, reliably, because of the years of careful training (and I don't mean formal training) it takes to form that kind of auditory discrimination skill for that sort of thing.
 
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Brian - Windows 10 Pro, 64-Bit, Version 1903, Build 18362  

Many of the insights of the saint stem from his experience as a sinner.

         ~ Eric Hoffer