My name is Ofer Chermesh and I am one of Ghotit founders. I have always struggled with writing and reading. When I was 10 years old I was diagnosed as a dyslexic. I have struggled with my dyslexia throughout my life, in school and in different workplaces.
Kids and adults with learning disabilities, like dyslexia, are heavy users of spell checkers. However, standard spell and grammar checkers address the needs of the general population, who demonstrates average spelling. These spell checkers produce low results for users who demonstrate poor English spelling such as people with dyslexia.
For years I have dreamt of an ideal Assistive Technology Solution that would help dyslexics like me both in school and at work. Ghotit is the company that I founded to fulfill that dream. Ghotit offers novel patent-pending context spell checking technology tuned for people with bad spelling. Using these algorithms Ghotit can pick up and correct not only really poorly spelled words but also misused words, words that are spelled correctly, but are written out of context. Ghotit has integrated into its spell checker unique features aimed to radically change the writing experience of bad spellers. Ghotit has integrated a dictionary service so that all suggested words are presented with their meanings. In addition, Ghotit has integrated a text-to-speech service so that the user can make sure that what he wrote is exactly what he intended to communicate.
Ghotit is a dream comes true for me. With Ghotit, I now write confidently, continuing to misspell as I always have, but with the confidence that Ghotit is there with me to review my writing and offer the right corrections.
I hope you will find Ghotit useful to you as it is for me.
Hi Ofer,
My name is Harvey Hubbell V, and I am a dyslexic filmmaker. I am currently finishing up a documentary on dyslexia and dyslexics called “Dislecksia: The Movie” and am trying to network with people who I think would be interested in the film. My goal in making it is to show the public what it’s like to have dyslexia and to promote changes to our educational system that will enable all children, both dyslexic and “normal” to learn to read and succeed.
I would love to have you check out the film at our website or on Facebook (Dislecksia: The Movie), or exchange blog links. You can find ours, giving updates on the progress of the film and what our crew is working on, at captime.blogspot.com.
I hope to hear from you soon.
Best,
Harvey Hubbell V
Dear Mr. Chermesh (or Ofer, if you prefer):
I emailed the following request for help to [email protected] but have yet to receive a response, so I figured I would try to contact you or another member of the Ghotit team through this channel as well.
My name is Jeremy, and I teach English writing and literature in a small private school exclusively for children and teenagers with learning disabilities. This summer, I am on a mission to do whatever possible to help this school update their technology out of the proverbial stone age. To call what this school has available for our students “stone age” technology may sound a bit harsh, but considering that nearly half of what we use on the computers runs off of DOS (yes, that’s right — DOS!), it’s not that much of an exaggeration. To compound our technology woes, while we are able to switch over to Windows on most machines in the building, all of the computers have been donated over the years, which has resulted in a unimaginable Frankenstein of a network. Some computers still run Windows ’98, some are on Windows 2000, and a few others are as close to up-to-date as our budget allows with Windows XP. The biggest goal I have in my efforts to help the tech staff update our technology this summer is to update as far as we can and then standardize that technology across the entire school. Hopefully, this will result in no further nightmares in which students start using Computer A in Classroom A to complete an assignment and then not being able to continue his/her work on Computer B across the hall in his/her study hall in Classroom B.
As part of this process of updating and standardizing our available technology, I have been struggling to find a way to replace our practice of using our DOS-based word processor. Sticking with MS Office ’97 would not be too bad if we had too, but I have also explored updating to the latest version of OpenOffice. Either way, one of the most critical hurdles I need to overcome in making this change happen is to find the most efficient and user-friendly grammar/spellchecker there is for our students to use. MS Word’s grammar/spellchecker is basic, but not quite up to par with what our students need, and what Writer has in OpenOffice by default is simply too overwhelming. To make a long story short, one helpful member of the OpenOffice community recommended Ghotit to me, and when I checked out your website, I literally jumped for joy.
As you might have surmised by this point, though, one major and truly annoying hurdle remains: compatibility. Although not spelled out on your site as far as I can tell, your YouTube video suggests that Ghotit only works with Windows 2007 and beyond. As I mentioned earlier, our school’s hands are tied between either sticking with MS Office ’97 or updating to the free OpenOffice suite. Is it possible that Ghotit is — or can be made to be — compatible with either one of those office suites? If so, then I would be thrilled beyond belief to apply for my school to use Ghotit…but if not, I would greatly appreciate your best recommendation of an alternative, if one exists. (I’m going to cross my fingers for the first option there!)
With regards to this query, Raphael Mudge of automattic.com’s “After the Deadline” add-in (who just so happens to be the “helpful member of the OOo community” I wrote about earlier that referred me to you) has graciously suggested that Ghotit use AtD’s new OOo extension as a template to create a Ghotit extension for OOo. Mr. Mudge is certainly passionate about improving the way(s) computers can check and correct grammar and spelling as evidenced by the paper he references below (sent in a PDF in my original email), and I wager he would be more than happy to help Ghotit in the process of making an extension for OOo to a certain extent. I unfortunately am not a programmer myself, but I would be more than happy to do my part with field testing Ghotit in the classroom and promoting Ghotit to the OOo education community and to my colleagues.
Thank you for your time. I eagerly await your response.
Sincerely,
Jeremy
Hi Ofer,
I work with Glenn Bailey, a successful entrepreneur with dyslexia. He wants to reach out to children who are dyslexic. He has a youtube video at the following link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-5gJ-AINoc which he would like posted to various dyslexia blogs in order to get the word out. If you could please link this video to one of your blogs, or let me know who I can contact in order to get this video posted, it would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you,
Ryan Buchanan
I am a fairly new blogger, for parents of dyslexics, and teachers, sharing how I teach writing.
Would you mind if we exchange links and hooked each other into our blog sites?
Does Ghotit work with Word 2004 v 11.6 for Mac?