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.

This entry was posted on June 26, 2008 at 3:33 pm and is filed under Spelling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.