Sunday 20 July 2008

Software to help Dyslexics with Spelling

Here's a news story on some software which can help dyslexics with there spelling. This has been created by an Israeli start up Company called Ginger Software. They have a demo of their software on the front page of their web site.

Here's what I got when I typed in three sentences:


  • 1. "Oi arm a god mann hoo doz not no hou to spel. Plese, reeda Who To Us the Spel Cheker nstractions."

  • 2. "My aidl holiday wood bee in nue zeelend, were I can go hickin"

  • 3. "I put up q6 for us to do, I hope thas ok wiv u - its jus dat every1 was takin d qs ;) hehe lolz im at home today, was lisenin 2 d lect online. nways lemme noe if u wanna link up 2 do dis q OR u wanna jus do it over dis discussion board ting. i dnt mind."



The results:


  • 1. "I am a good man who does not no how to spell. Please, readers who told us the spell checker store"

  • 2. "My ideal holiday would be in new Zealand, where I can go hiking"

  • 3. "Server Error in '/' Application.
    parsing ";)(\s+)" - Too many )'s. Parameter name: ;)(\s+) "




On result 3 - Oh dear......

There is also another service like this available on the web, called 'Ghotit'. Here's those same sentences above with this particular service:


  • 1. I am a good man who does not know how to spell. Please, reader How To Use the Spell Checker instructions.

  • 2. My ideal holiday would be in new zeelend, where I can go hiking

  • 3. I put up q6 for us to do, I hope that ok wiv u - its just dat every1 was taking d qs ;) he-he lolz im at home today, was listening 2 d lect online. anyways lemme know if u wanna link up 2 do dis q OR u wanna just do it over dis discussion board thing. i don't mind



The third one is text speak, and really doesn't so that well, but is definitely better than Ginger Software's result!

Ghotit works differently from Ginger Software's version, in that it is more interactive. Ginger software just comes back with a result, whereas Ghotit's services allows you a choice of words for each spelling mistake and provides you with definitions. Ginger Software does however show where the mistakes are by highlighting them in Red.

These services are excellent, and I would recommend them to anybody. If you just want a fast result Gingers probably good enough, if you want to examine a sentence in more depth, the Ghotit's the one for you.

(h/t: Norman Geras, and Areej Al-Wabil).

Links to all the posts in this series are available here.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I want to share with you how Ghotit (www.Ghotit.com) works.
Ghotit has a premise that there is no sequence of words that you are the first person in the word that write them and if you are most probably you are wrong .

Fore example if you do a Google search for the following 2 sentences:

"Meet you at 8"
"Meat you at 8"

You will find that the frequency for the first sentence is 3,690
And for the second sentence the frequency is only 8

The results give you a clear indication that in the second sentence the word Meat is misused.

Ghotit has 2 colors for induction of spelling problems:

Red – words that are misspelled
Blow – words that Ghotit suspect as misused

When you go over the corrections Ghotit offers pleas indicated in cases you can find a suggestion the following:

Ignore – this is the word I wanted to spell
No relevant – I did not find a relevant suggestion.

When you finish all corrections Ghotit will run a second time automatically and will offer you new corrections.

andy said...

Many thanks for the explanation.