Spellcheckers

Not all spellcheckers are equal. The last comparative study of spellcheckers that I am aware of was published as a study by the CALL Centre, Edinburgh University. I made a small contribution to the Document; Supportive writing software. The performance of various spellcheckers can be found here.

Take a look at the graphs on pp. 144 & 145.

To try out a spellchecker you need texts written by youngsters with literacy difficulties. You'll find some here

The intention is that you can copy and paste these texts into a word processor and see whether the author of that text is likely to be an effective user of a spellchecker.

There is also a printable version of some of the texts here.

Here is another text, written by a pupil with dyslexic style difficulties;

How to bild a longhouse

It shod be hiy abuv water anb flat lanbscap.
Then to cut don the tree for the longhouse and the tools will be a acx and ads and laders lumberjacs. Mijer the lenths of the wood stics and logs to mace the wals and to poot watil and dob is a clay ,hare, muck .Sume house have turf or fahc for turf you ned to get sum grass for the roof and mace som laders ut of wood. Lev a holl in the top of the roof to let smock escap.

There are 96 words here and 27 misspelled words - over a quarter!
There are 8 real word errors; 'shod' for should; 'mace' for make; smock for smoke, etc
Of the remaining errors the spellchecker in MS Word suggested the target word in 13 cases while it faiuled to suggest the word in 6 cases.