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Dyslexia Writing Problem In today's school and business environments, the most common means of communication is reading and writing. People that don’t master those communication methods are usually left behind. According to some estimations 5-15% the population suffers from dyslexia, a neurological problem that affects those peoples’ ability to write and read freely.
SpellCheckers Deficiencies The common number one writing assistive technology, the standard spellchecker, is not effective for people with dyslexia and people that use English as their second language. This failure is due to two structural limitations of all spellcheckers:
a. The fact that a spelled word needs to be very, very close to the target word in order to get corrected spelling
b. The fact that the text is checked word by word, disregarding any contextual considerations
From a technical perspective, most of the spellcheckers use a very limited editing distance (Levenshtein distance), which is defined as the number of operations required to transform one word into another. For example, the words ‘happy’ and ‘hapy’ have an editing distance of 1 (one missing letter) and will, therefore be attuned successfully, but the words "happy" and "apy" have an editing distance of 2 and therefore will not be treated successfully.
In addition, standard spellcheckers will regard the sentence “I will be happy to meat you at 8 o'clock” as a legitimate expression, disregarding the intention of the writer, which is “I will be happy to meet you at 8 o'clock. The word “meat” will not appear as a misspelled word since it is found in the dictionary. Such out-of-context words like "meat" are commonly referred as misused or confused words. List of commonly misused English language phrases is not helpful to address the issue since writing errors due to dyslexia are spanning far beyond the list.
Ghotit History Ghotit was founded by Ofer Chermesh, a lifelong dyslectic and entrepreneur .
Ghotit Dyslexia Assistance Ghotit web site launched in 2008 contains on-line speller aimed for dyslexia assistance. .
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