While I will fully understand if my request is not possible due to technical limitations or would pose a policy problem I figured it would be in everyone’s best interest to at least ask.
As everyone on the board has noticed my posts can be difficult to read due to spelling and typographical errors.
I am challenged with what is termed a transcription disability. Sometimes categorized as Dysgraphia or Orthographic Dyslexia. The DSM really doesn’t have a good fit in it’s present form.
In an attempt to explain the experience. I will mentally perform an edit in my mind and for a short time period when I review the actual work I mentally read the intended text, failing to notice the actual errors. Most of my errors become painfully obvious when reviewing a short time later. (Note: thanks for putting up with my posts people, seriously it is appreciated!!)
If there was some way for me to pledge to never make an edit which would change the content of a post while allowing for a slightly longer edit window to fix obvious errors it would help.
Even an additional 90 seconds would probably result in significantly improved readability on my posts.
I will continue to work on finding methods that do not require any accommodation on the part of board. However if this option is feasible, simple to implement, and acceptable I would appropriate the consideration.
I’m pretty sure we all do this. A ton of my posts are edited, multiple times, until I run out the clock.
And I preview and check for (and fix) a few before I submit it too. But like you, I always seem to find more after I see my post live. I just try to go after the one ones that make the post readable (ie using the wrong word entirely or missed punctuation) first, then the spelling errors)
It is what it is.
I have a similar situation. Because I am blind, I often do not see typos until I post, set in a larger font. Enlarging the text entry field tends to garble the display. I have experienced the same frustration, but I’ve learned to just post and say to hell with it.
There’s two options for “enlarging the text field” FYI. So it might make a difference which one you’re using. You can grab the corners of it with the mouse and make it the actual area you type in bigger. But the actual text doesn’t change size. The other option is to make everything on screen larger. On a PC the two easy ways I know for doing that are to hold down Control and hit + or - or to hold down control while using the scroll wheel on your mouse. In both those cases Control 0 (Control Zero) will snap everything back to normal. Again, that actually enlarges the screen, much like zooming in on a phone. I use that option even just to get a better view of a picture. Also, if you have a touch screen monitor, you can just zoom in on with your fingers like you would a phone.
Also, again if you have a PC, every version of Windows has a handful of accessibility options in the control panel. Contrasted colors, magnified text etc.
First, I’ve never noticed your posts to be difficult to read or riddled with errors, so you’re doing a good job in working around your problem.
Have you tried writing your post in some other editor, Notepad, or whatever’s on the device you use? Then, you can read it at your leisure, fix errors, and post.
I think a rolling five minute window would make sense – if you edit your post, it resets the five minute window. Maybe it already does that? Maybe the board software can’t do that?
Anyway, using your own editor and changing the text size should help. And, Preview Post is your friend – then, you can see the post as it actually will appear and make changes then. I don’t think Preview Post starts the timer, right?
Again, though, you’re doing a great job getting around your disability as far as I can tell.
No, the board software has a single timeout value and that’s it.
You are correct. The timer starts when the post is submitted. You can preview as long as you want before that.
Notepad doesn’t have a built-in spell checker. You can preview and check spelling in Microsoft Word if you have that on your computer. There are numerous free word processors like AbiWord if you don’t have Microsoft Office and don’t want to pay for it.
A spell checker won’t catch every error (sometimes you can make a typo that makes another perfectly valid word), but it will catch most of them.
For longer posts, either replies or as OPs, I have a habit of writing them off the board and then doing a copy and paste job. This allows me to catch most of my errors, both spelling and in clarity, before the vB clock starts running. I don’t know if something like that would help you — but for what its worth there it is.
(I’m running an old Mac with Neo but I actually find the old AOL software the easiest for me in terms of playing with size and all. This board automatically adjusts 99% of it all when I paste it in.)
I will sometimes start a post in Notepad & then copy it here; but typically find some editing needs to be done here after clicking on the <Preview Post> button. The difference is that if you compose in Notepad/Word, it doesn’t create proper vBulliten tags for quare brackets like bold, italics, hyperlinks, etc.