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Braille has many of the same properties, and it could be worthwhile to train yourself to read it visually. If you went down that path, though, I think you'd get to a point where you'd say: hmm, if I'm going to start over I might as well make the letters one column of dots, so the words are roughly square-ish and can form more visually distinct shapes. The shape of Braille words wouldn't be much of an improvement over Latin - unnecessarily long and skinny. Which is probably a good fit for a finger but less optimal for an eye. And then there's that unnecessary sixth dot.

As to the originality, most computer science students have looked at a binary versions of ascii charts at one time or another. Turning them sideways and making a font out of it isn't discovering relativity. On the other hand, even Braille had its percursors (see your Wikipedia link), and Braille users don't reject it on that account, do they?

> Silicon Valley

You're assuming I'm from Silicon Valley. I am here now, but was actually in Ohio when I came up with Dotsies :)

How easy it would be to "read" Braille visually, like Dotsies? I imagine they are optimized for different uses, no?

Yes but that isn't meant for screen space saving or legibility - dotsies is optimizing for both.

They could maybe do better on legibility, or maybe it isn't that big a problem...the more I think on it, the more I get where the author was going (and feel they may have successfully reached it, or at least made strong progress)

this is significantly more compact than braille. braille is less compact than latin characters, and the point of this exercise was more compact information.