Seeing Your Dyslexic Child’s Writing For The First Time

Millions of kids have recently started going to school worldwide, about 10% of them suffering from dyslexia.

As the year unfolds, some parents of first and second graders will see for the first time the written text that their son or daughter has just written, and will ask themselves “ What is this? What gibberish has my son or daughter produced?”

For some of these parents this will be the first indication of their child’s writing disability, and their initiation as dyslexic parents…

As a lifelong dyslexic and a dyslexia advocate, I would like to provide these parents my non-scientific definition of  “dyslexia spelling” – spelling produced by dyslexics…

Dyslexia Spelling = Phonetic Spelling + Creative Spelling

What is Phonetic Spelling?

When you’re dictating a word and tell your son or daughter that he should write what he hears, a child, including a dyslexic, will attempt to map the sounds in the words to the sounds of the letters.

However, English is not a phonetic language. There are a very large number of English words where there is a gap between how the word sounds and how the word is actually spelled. Not to mention, there are many times multiple correct phonetic options to a sound (for example: k , c, ck, and qu all sound about the same)…

What is Creative Spelling?

Given that English spelling is not phonetic, and per each sound may have several spelling options, a lot of correct English spelling is dependent on the visual memory of a written word. If you have good visual memory of words, you will be able to spell a word correctly simply by writing it down, and from memory deciding if this is the correct spelling.

But people with dyslexia, have very poor and consistent visual memory of spelled words, and therefore can hardly rely on their visual memory of words.  (see my example of how I spell the word “unfortunately” in a previous Ghotit Post – My Dyslexia and Phonological Processing.)

Not to mention that dyslexics sometimes simply confuse the direction of letters, and though they meant to write the letter “b” actually end up writing the letter “d”…

I term all the above spelling challenges as “creative spelling”. It is “creative” in the sense, that given that a person simply has no idea of how to spell correctly certain syllables of a word, he creatively makes them up as he writes. And each time he “creates” a word’s spelling, it usually ends up as a different spelling creation.

Can a regular spell checker correct dyslexia spelling?

If English was a phonetic language, then regular spell checkers who have implemented phonetic spelling rules would probably provide some value for dyslexics with poor visual spelling memory…

However, English is not a phonetic language, and therefore the “creative spelling” of a person with dyslexia must be taken into account in a spell checker. However the “creative” spelling of a dyslexic is basically “noise” and therefore any computerized program, such as a regular spell checker, that tries to correct a single word at a time (and not based on the context of the sentence) is doomed to fail… That is why Microsoft spell checker many times simply fails to correct a heavily misspelled word written by a dyslexic.

Context-based spell-checkers for dyslexia spelling

Here is where benefits of a context spell checker such as Ghotit’s Contextual Spell Checker come to play. Context-based spell checkers not analyze directly the “creative spelling” of each word written by a dyslexic, but rather based on the context of what was written, intelligently offers corrections, predicting what was actually intended to be written.

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Adult Dyslexics – Follow Technology Trends

I am an adult dyslexic in his early 40’s. Personal desktop computers made their household entrance during the 80’s, about the time I was in high-school. So from high school onwards, computers have accompanied my life. Younger adults in their 20’s and 30’s may have had computers introduced into their lives since elementary school.

There is no arguing the fact that computer technology has leaped forward in the past 30 years. Moore’s Law that predicted that computer power would double itself every 2 years or so has proven it correct since the early 1970s till this very day. Current Cloud Computing paradigms, enabling consumers to purchase computing and storage resources based on a utility consumption model (such as the consumption of electricity) from huge computer farms owned by the likes of Google and Amazon forebodes the next revolution in computing technology.

From the software side, dramatic advances are also continuously taking place. Open Source Code has enabled core infrastructure software components such as Operating Systems, Databases, Development Environments etc. to be widely available at low cost. Software trends such as the publishing of Application Programmer’s Interfaces (APIs) and developing Software Oriented Architecture (SOA) has made external software components suddenly interoperable and “meshed”-enabled with other software components.

So what does all this have to do with adult dyslexics and giving their writing another chance?

Well, I know many adult dyslexics that have struggled with their writing for years (myself included). They have worked with various built-in Word Processors’ spell-checkers. Usually at certain points in their education or careers they have even investigated and tried specialized dyslexia text correction solutions.

However, at a certain point, these adults have settled into a self-defined routine of working around their spelling and writing limitations. Their disappointments in finding a real working solution for their writing turn them off from continuing to seek a working solution. In a sense, they have given up hope in finding a truly effective solution.

But here is where the technological advances listed above come to play. The new technological innovations being introduced at a phenomenal pace bring with them new capabilities that may dramatically change the quality and effectiveness of assistive technologies, and writing assistive technologies in particular.

Ghotit develops innovative writing software for people with dyslexia. As a founder of Ghotit, I can confidently say that an offering like Ghotit could not have been delivered to the market 2 years earlier, without the dramatic technological leaps described above.

It is difficult to change ones’ habits, even more so for somebody that has tried so in the past and has been disappointed…

But the reward here is great…

The reward is acquiring the capabilities to dramatically improve ones’ communication skills and to convert ones’ poorly spelled writing to mainstream writing.

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Dyslexia and Regular Spell Checkers

Every time I use a regular spell checker it hits me that the people who designed these spell checkers did not have in mind people like me, people who suffer from dyslexia and have really bad spelling. When I use a regular spell checker I receive a word which is underlined in red and I am faced with one of the following problems:

  1. My intended word is not in the suggestions list. This is because my spelling was too far away from the correct spelling (meaning I spell REALLY badly), and the spellchecker simply could not pick up on my intended word.
  2. My intended word is in the suggestions list, but since I am such a bad speller, I have no idea how to select the correct word from the list.

Misused words, words that are spelled correctly but are not the words I intended to write, are also a major issue. I encounter misused words either by entering the misused word originally or selecting a misused (wrong) word from the spell checker’s word suggestion list. I then send these sentences with the misused words out to the world without even knowing what nonsense I have just written. For example, many times I have invited business colleagues for a “Mating” instead of a “Meeting”… I tried all available spellchecking and writing assistance technologies, but none seemed to work for me. After discussing the regular spell checkers limitations with many dyslexics, we began to think and design a spell checker specifically targeting the dyslexic community. Such a spell checker would include the following key capabilities:

  • A spellchecker that can pick up on really bad spelling, and offer the correct suggestions
  • A context spellchecker, that can understand the context of what I am writing, in order to avoid situations where I write a correctly spelled word but it is a  completely different word then the one I intended (misused word)
  • A spellchecker that offers for each suggested word its meaning so that I can easily select the intended word
  • A spellchecker that can read out loud to me what I wrote, to make sure that what I wrote is really what I intended to write.

Ghotit context-spellchecker incorporates all the capabilities listed above. If you are suffering from dyslexia, you should know that Ghotit, unlike regular spellcheckers, was designed specifically to meet your (our) unique spell checking needs.