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.