Re: spell-check, yes

What if we add this as an item in the testing section (Appendix A)?
Something along the lines of:

Use a spell checker. A person reading a page with a speech synthesizer may
not be able to decipher the synthesizer's best guess for a word with a
spelling errror.  

However, upon hearing the garbled word, a person could read the word letter
by letter and hopefully decipher the intended word.  This increases
cognitive load and time to read the page.  Spell checking is a good
practice, so including it in Testing keeps it out of the guidelines, but
points people in the direction we would like them to head.

thoughts?
--w

At 03:52 AM 10/26/98 , you wrote:
>OK. Priorety 3.
>We should allow though to include misspelt words in 
><META name="keywords"> for our illetrate readers who look us up
>in search engines.
>
>Best,
>Nir.
>
>> And, by the way, I do believe we _should_ mention spell-checking.
>> 
>> This is another case of a general good practice, where failing to
>> follow the practice has more severe impacts on the text-to-speech
>> user than on the visual user.  Someone reading with their eyes
>> can usually pick out the spelling error or will in fact read
>> right through it without perceiving the error.  But someone
>> depending on text to speech will get garbage for a word with a
>> spelling error.  This heightened vulnerability to something that
>> otherwise is a minor nuisance _should be mentioned_.
>> 
>> Al
>> 
>> PS: This is a "do as I say, not as I do."  One can find ample
>> evidence of this effect among the perplexed readers of my
>> unchecked email <wince>.
> 

Received on Wednesday, 11 November 1998 10:36:47 UTC