A Spellchecker for Dyslexia
Luz Rello, Miguel Ballesteros, Jeffrey P. Bigham · 2015
Poor spelling is a challenge faced by people with dyslexia throughout their lives. Spellcheckers are therefore a crucial tool for people with dyslexia, but current spellcheckers do not detect real-word errors, which are a common type of errors made by people with dyslexia. Real-word errors are spelling mistakes that result in an unintended but real word, for instance, form instead of from. Nearly 20% of the errors that people with dyslexia make are real-word errors. In this paper, we introduce a system called Real Check that uses a probabilistic language model, a statistical dependency parser and Google n-grams to detect real-world errors. We evaluated Real Check on text written by people with dyslexia, and showed that it detects more of these errors than widely used spellcheckers. In an experiment with 34 people (17 with dyslexia), people with dyslexia corrected sentences more accurately and in less time with Real Check.