I’m curious, if you’re dyslexic and want to post on a message board or a blog will spell checking help weed out errors like it does for those not afflicted?
It depends on what kind of dyslexia you have. Some dyslexics reverse letters within the same word, resulting in spelling errors. So I would imagine that spellcheck would be beneficial in those cases…unless of course the word with the switched letters was a legitimate word. I have the kind where I reverse the words within a sentence, so spellcheck doesn’t help at all.
I’ve worked with a person with dyslexia while using fairly specialist database software. They were quite happy to talk about their condition, and smart enough to be able to explain the problems they had encountered in some detail. Some of this was in the way the interface was designed, which simply added to the long mental list of issues I had with the thing, but others were quite fascinating. She had particular difficulty with buttons or menu options being contextualised purely by position, for example when there were buttons down the left of the screen and the menu bar at the top. Heirarchical menus, too, were a big challenge.
I learnt a huge amount from the small time I worked with her, both in the ways the condition can affect people and how I can try to accomodate this, and also in my ability to describe things in a way I’m not used to. Rather I did long ago when giving or taking driving directions from a both smart and non-dyslexic friend, who can’t tell left from right.
As already stated spelling errors are reduced, word order errors are not.
In my work experience, I’ve encountered more people who have numerical dyslexia. Spellcheck can’t help them. If only higherups were smart enough to keep them out of positions which depend on writing numbers in the correct order, then the world would be a better place. But, that’s for another day.
wouldn’t a grammar check pick up those ones?
It’s saved my hash a couple times!
Sorry to hear it, it must be horribly frustrating for anybody suffering from it.
Are you able to pick up these misplaced words when you read the copy over?
In something like a Word document, it probably would. However, the OP specified posting on a message board or blog. I suppose you could compose your message in Word, run a spelling and grammar check, then copy and paste into your browser. But the built in spell checker in a browser such as Firefox, for example, would only catch spelling errors, and not grammatical.
My case is very mild now. For reasons unexplained, it went from moderate to very mild after I had LASIK (my doc said this supports the visual theory). As a kid it was horribly frustrating and I can remember being terrified every time I got called on in class to read aloud. Oddly enough, I was a wiz at math and never transposed numbers. But to answer your question, I can sometimes pick up the misplaced words but often times I will proof read something several times and everything looks in order…then I’ll re-read it at a later time and see the misplaced words.
My lesdixia is mild, But I sometimes have to work with the spell checker until it will give me a choice. Google is in my opinion the best spell checker.