Re: Checking spelling in input areas

I agree that browsers should be able to spell-check users' text entry - if
only there were a more sensible system of plugging in components across
browsers this might be closer to reality. I'm glad that it at least exists.

But there are reasons (beyond the real world one, of "yes, but you would also
expect common email systems to be secure enough to be used") why this is only
ahlf the picture. In many cases a Web author is offering a somewhat
restricted choice of options. In this case they are better placed than the
browser to guess what an appropriate correction might be. This is the premise
that allows VoiceXML to work - despite the overall poor results from voice
recognition across wide audiences, limiting the choices to a set can give
powerful algorithms for getting a good result in the use case.

For some years I have used predicitve text input systems in a similar way,
for multilingual work. They select between a wide range of known terms in a
given language, guiding me away from misspellings (but not, actually
preventing me from spelling a word exactly as I please, if I choose) or other
errors. And this in 8 languages on a phone too old to have a proper web
browser.

cheers

Chaals

On Fri, 22 Aug 2003, Joe Clark wrote:

>
>Web authors should never be forced to spell-check outside visitors'
>entries; that's a user-agent issue. And at least one such user agent
>exists:
>
><http://www.iespell.com/>
>
>>ieSpell is a free Internet Explorer browser extension that spell
>>checks text input boxes on a webpage. It should come in particularly
>>handy for users who do a lot of web-based text entry (e.g. web
>>mails, forums, blogs, diaries). Even if your web application already
>>includes spell checking functionality, you might still want to
>>install this utility because it is definitely much faster than a
>>server-side solution. Plus you get to store and use your personal
>>word list across all your applications, instead of maintaining
>>separate ones on each application.
>
>--
>
>     Joe Clark | joeclark@joeclark.org
>     Accessibility <http://joeclark.org/access/>
>     Author, _Building Accessible Websites_
>     <http://joeclark.org/book/>
>

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Received on Saturday, 23 August 2003 15:08:54 UTC