[akavel]

Ah, this seems to make sense, thx! Pity that this extended rationale is not present in the original article. Actually, this seems to render the article's claim rather unfair in laying the blame on screen readers ("[screen readers] read ‘eg’ incorrectly"), as it appears it should be rather "we have many errors of 'eg' instead of 'e.g.' in our texts, and they're too hard to catch for our editors"

edit: personally, I don't have to use a screen reader, but I do read words "aloud" in my mind when reading, and I believe seeing "eg" or "ie" without dots would make me stumble mentally too...

[efaref]

It seems that a lot of style guides these days actually recommend "eg" and "ie" over the versions with dots in a misguided attempt at simplification. I guess with those guides out there, the damage is already done.

Personally I always try to re-write sentences that use "e.g.", "i.e." or "etc.", as I think they're symptomatic of lazy writing. There's usually a much better way to write what you're trying to say. Similarly with excessive use of parenthetical clauses.