MS-Word 2007 for Windows and MS-Word 2008 for Macintosh so-called “contextual spelling” was introduced with a great enthusiasm as expressed e.g. here.
Office 2007 for Windows (2008 for Mac) automatically activates “contextual spelling”, if a computer has at least 1 GB of memory, otherwise, you can configure it manually: Enable Contextual spelling in Microsoft Word 2007
You may teach your students to pay attention to the words underlined by a blue line, which Office-2007 is suspecting to be out-of-context / misused / confused, whereas the right click mouse menu contains some correction candidates.
Spelling capabilities of about all of the existing spellers, tools, word-processors, etc have been studied by Dr. Pedler in the link below and the citations inside, and found to be not of a much assistance for people with dyslexia: Computer Correction of Real-word Spelling Errors in Dyslexic Text
Since the research of Dr. Pedler does not cover MS-Word-2007 with contextual spelling capabilities, we made a small comparison testing among Word-2003, Word-2007 and Ghotit web-site speller. Still, this is not a comprehensive research using a big corpus.
Some brief conclusions are that Word-2007 is better than Word-2003 due to contextual spelling, where there is still remains a large room for improvements.
College Confidence with ADD
The Ultimate Success Manual for ADD Students, from Applying to Academics, Preparation to Social Success and Everything Else You Need to Know
Author: Michael Sandler
ISBN-13: 978-1-4022-1251-2
Many of America’s juvenile jails would be empty if the public schools obeyed federal law and provided disabled children with the special instruction that they need. Instead, these children are allowed to fall behind. When they act out, they are often suspended or expelled, which makes them more likely to commit crimes and land in jails where they can count on even less help.
…for many of us with less-severely affected children, the “tragedy” of Autism simply isn’t. In our current culture of pathology, children who 50 years ago would have just been considered a bit odd, or loners, now have a diagnosis, a therapy team, endless rounds of assessments, a mound of county and school district education plan paperwork and, all too often, a pile of prescription medications.
Ginger Software offers an automatic text correction (spell checking) product aimed at dyslexic writers. Currently it only works with the Windows version of Microsoft Word but they will expand its application base in the future. It requires an internet connection.
Warning: the Ginger Software web site is extremely slow to load, no doubt because of the product demo at the top. The product really does work quite well and it’s worth the wait for the site to load to experiment with it.
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