Re: How much does spelling matter
KeyIsFull, as far as I am concerned good spelling and grammar is mandatory for a site maintainer. Especially, for one writing up news articles, game reviews, etc that will be read by the general public. I don't think we can expect everyone on the forum to have good grammar and spelling, but I would expect any news articles, game reviews, and other aspects of the site itself to be properly spell checked and properly edited for errors. There are many reasons for that not the least of which any reasonably educated person who comes along and sees those mistakes are going to come away with a negative opinion of blind people.
Unfortunately, all of us have to face negative stereotypes in one way or another, but when one of us posts a message to a mailing list, a blog, forum, writes a review for a site like audiogames.net that person is a representative of the blind and low vision community. People are not only going to judge that person by what he or she says and does, but tha t opinion can reflect badly on the rest of the community. Especially, if the majority of posts on that blog, forum, or mailing list are poorly spelled and have serious grammatical and punctuation errors. At the very least that person will assume blind and low vision people can not spell. However, it is possible they may also assume we are poorly educated, perhaps assume that we are not very smart, and may assume all sorts of other things about us just because we chose not to take spelling and grammar all that serious.
The thing that irritates me most about this sort of debate is none of that has to happen. Spell checkers are a dime a dozen. The three major e-mail clients for Windows such as Microsoft Outlook, Windows Mail, and Thunderbird all have spell checkers. There are free word processors like Jarte with a free spell checker as well. So there is no excuse not to have a spell checker and use it. The only reason more blind and low vision users don't is they simpl y don't care about their public image or anyone else's. It is easier to be lazy than spend a minute or two to spell check and proofread what they wrote.
Something else that I have noticed is those who regularly use braille displays tend to be better spellers than those who exclusively depend on speech output. It may be a case of out of sight out of mind, but I think braille displays offer positive reinforcement as far as spelling goes. With text to speech if someone misspells the word "since" as "sinse" the chances are he or she will miss it because most text to speech voices will pronounce both correctly. However, if someone is reading along with a braille display the error will be immediately noticeable. So as the lack of braille literacy increases among the blind its possible that we are seeing that through increased spelling and punctuation errors. I don't know that is going to be something we can solve without forcing blind compute r users to be more diligent about spell checking and grammar checking their work with free tools.
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