Ghotit

There are various misconceptions about spellcheckers. This article aims to clarify some important points.

Almost all wordprocessors, computer software or hardware notetakers, have a spellchecker, however there is a great variety in quality betweeen the best and the worst. This is rarely recognised. The Study carried out by CALL Scotland in 1999 called – Supportive Writing Technology included the only comparative study of spellcheckers. It is still valid. Unfortunately some of the best have disappeared from the market – The Apple Emate for example. Many of the poorest have not got any better. The Alphasmart series of Note takers still have a poor spellchecker.  Microsoft Word is still a decent spellchecker but not the best. The very good Franklin Elementary Spellmaster has been discontinued. However its alogorhythm has been incorporated into  the Write Out Loud talking word processor. very good, but still has some weaknesses.

Very few people are aware of these great differences. The CALL Scotland results can be viewed in the on-line document; http://callcentre.education.ed.ac.uk/downloads/swbook/swbook12-15.pdf

I have investigated  the spellcheckers in word processing software aimed at pupils with spoelling difficuluties. In some cases,  they have proved to less effective at identifying the intended word than MS Word. I feel that producers of these packages are being rather cynical.

It would be really good to have a basic word processing package with good spellchecker  running under Linux. This could be very useful if installed on the new range of Asus EePC/RM Minibooks. The spellchecker in the open-source Open Office is poor compared with MS Word.

So it all bad news then?  Not a lot has happened since the CALL SCotland report in 1999? Well, yes.  However yesterday I received an email from CALL Scotland about Ghotit;

This on-line spellchecker seems to very good. I hope that CALL Scotland will do a comparative review of Ghotit using the same  set of misspelt words that they used in the 1999 study. In the meantime you can judge it for yourself;   http://www.ghotit.com/

This new development really cheered me up. There is someone who cares about the quality of spellcheckers and recognises that dyslexics can benefit much more from a good quality spellchecker. It is not clear, from the website, where this devlopment is leading. I hope to a simple text editor with built in qulaity spellchecker – for Linux, Mac and PC.  Even a web only version would be very welcome.

I hope to find out soon. Watch this space.

Producing accessible versions of novels to be used by V.I. pupils who need large print or disabled pupils who cannot turn the the pages, is a task that many support staff are involved in. Where a classic text is needed, it can usually be found at the project Gutenberg; http://www.gutenberg.org/

Librivox is a project that aims to make all out of copyright works available as audio books. The readers are volunteers. The quality can vary from near professional to a little hard to follow. Some books have a single reader while others have readers taking several chapters each.

I have listened with pleasure to; the Sherlock Holmes stories of Conan Doyle; the frontier novels of Jack London; the witty anecdotes of P.G. Woodhouse and the science fiction novels of H.G. Wells. These are all on my personal mp3 player. A pupil with significant visual difficulties needs to read “The War of the Worlds” by H.G. Wells over the summer. What luck, it’s there at Librivox waiting to de downloaded. http://www.librivox.org

The quality of the reading is excellent. You could not wish for a better reader. He makes a couple of slips, but nothing annoying. If you want to try Librivox, start with this science fiction classic. The other early master of the genre, Jules Verne, is well represented. Some of his books are available in French, e.g. “Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours, Le”