[gutvol-d] Re: why the plain-text format is the most useful format for eliciting beauty (and more)

Yes, you understand me the way I understand the blind readers I know of, namely that they will read _an ironic reference_ as "underscore an ironic reference underscore" not read with prosodic emphasis "an ironic reference". Thus when you turn off punctuation you also lose any representation of prosodic emphasis that the author originally encoding in the original printed text. This is not a small deal, IMHO. There are some books such as "The Dove" by Henry James which are virtually impossible to even scan without maintaining the author's original proper representation of prosodic emphasis.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Most screen readers will read underlines or periods as underlines or periods,