A Spellchecker for Dyslexia

Poor spelling is a challenge faced by people with dyslexia throughout their lives. Spellcheckers are therefore a cru­ cial 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 er­ rors. In this paper, we introduce a system called Real Check that uses a probabilistic language model, a statistical de­ pendency 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 er­ rors 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. Keywords Dyslexia; Spellchecker; Real-Word Errors; ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: ASSETS
• Authors: Luz Rello, Miguel Ballesteros, Jeffrey P. Bigham
• Keywords: ASSETS 2015, Emerging Technology