This is the report on the legibility of Kana letters when they are read by those handicapped in sight. The threshold of the legibility has been measured by the method of exposing momentarily the square and cursive forms of Kana in No. I Ming type. The handicapped condition of 0.3 in visual acuity was experimentally given to the subjects who are students of normal sight by covering their eyes with neutral filters The main results are as follows: 1) It takes undoutedly much more time for the subjects when they are handicapped to make out the letters, and the threshold of legibility is seven times as high as that found in those when they are not. This threshold gets higher in the order of voiceless, voiced and semi-voiced sounds from the nature of a voice. From the forms of letters, the cursive ones are deciphered more easily than the square ones. 2) The letters easy to make out for the subjects, whether they are of normal sight or of visual acuity 0.3, are arranged as given below; a. In the casc of square forms, the following letters have high positions :「リ」,「イ」,「セ」,「ト」,「ヘ」,「ム」,「ル」The following have low positions:「ヨ」,「ウ」,「ユ」 b. In the case of cursive forms, the letters of high position are as follows:「へ」,「り」,「れ」,「ん」,「い」,「し」,「す」,「や」 The following are of low positions:「ま」,「ち」,「さ」,「も」,「う」,「せ」,「め」 c. The letter of「ワ」,「あ」,「と」「わ」take high positions when they are deciphered by those who are given normal sight, but when they are examined by the handicapped of partial sight they take low positions. d. In the case of the fonms expressing a voiced sound, the「ダ」,「じ」,「げ」have high positions and 「ヅ」,「ビ」,「ぢ」,「ぼ」have low ones. 3) The errors in reading are much more when read by the handicapped than when read by the normal. From the form of a letter corresponding to the nature of a sound, the rate of the mistakes goes up higher when it is of a voiceless, voiced or semivoiced sound in this order. The errors in mistaking the letters of semi-voiced sounds and those of voiced ones are mostly made by not telling one added mark of a letter from the other. Moreover, both the marks of voiced letters and those of semi-voiced letters are likely to be dropped in reading. On the other hand. when the voiceless letters are given, they are often confused with the other letters which carry no added marks.
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