Lateral masking is a problem for the human visual perception

Visual perception

Visual perception is the ability to interpret information and surroundings from the effects of visible light reaching the eye. The resulting perception is also known as eyesight, sight, or vision...

 of identical or similar entities in close proximity. This can be illustrated by the difficulty of counting the vertical bars of a barcode

Barcode

A barcode is an optical machine-readable representation of data, which shows data about the object to which it attaches. Originally barcodes represented data by varying the widths and spacings of parallel lines, and may be referred to as linear or 1 dimensional . Later they evolved into rectangles,...

.

In linguistics

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

 lateral masking refers to the interference a letter

Letter (alphabet)

A letter is a grapheme in an alphabetic system of writing, such as the Greek alphabet and its descendants. Letters compose phonemes and each phoneme represents a phone in the spoken form of the language....

 has on its neighbor. This is a problem readers encounter when reading a word. The identity of a letter in the middle of a word is obscured by the presence of its neighboring letters.

Lateral masking is also a problem in orthography

Orthography

The orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian or Inuktitut, there can be more than one orthography...

 design. A readable

Reading (process)

Reading is a complex cognitive process of decoding symbols for the intention of constructing or deriving meaning . It is a means of language acquisition, of communication, and of sharing information and ideas...

orthography will avoid situations in which a reader is faced with severe lateral masking.