Category: Let's talk
Okay, I was searching the web a couple of days ago and came across a website that was made by someone that is blind and I couldn't believe what I read on the welcome page. In essence the message was that please forgive the spelling as blind people don't spell well since we don't see the words. This is crazy. You don't have to see words to know how to spell them. If you went through any kind of school at all you should know how to spell, though I find most people don't take the time, disabled or not, to actually spell anything anymore. If you have sight or some sight you can see the words and how letters are shaped, but most blind people learn through braille what the braille letters are and how words go together, which is the same spelling as in print. Now if you were born in another country where English isn't your primary language then I can understand people not spelling English correctly, but they should be able to spell words in their native tongue with no problems.
I just thought of mentioning this as the site was basically implying that blind people can't spell just because they can't "see" the letters and shape of words. I just thought it was odd.
Let me mention here that I do have some sight so learnt spelling both through site and braille. Though when I was learning the braille letters, I was surprised that they weren't the same shape as the printed letters so it was like learning two languages.
Shut up! This is absolutely unbelievable! I'd like to know whether a sighted or blind person put up that disclaimer. That is outrageous regardless. An e-mail should be sent to have this message taken down. That is so uncalled for, inappropriate, and untrue.
I lost my eyesight when I was eight so I naturally am a visual learner. I can't spell without seeing it in my head and I can't do math without righting it out with my finger. I Wright math out in print and spelling is jumbled now I am 21 years. I Have bad spelling but that’s because no one tried to teach me how to spell, they were too intense with teaching me Braille and in contraction not even caring of the spelling. However I do take in to grater consideration for my spelling now, however that is a personal choice. I also can't spell very well if I am speaking the letters, I have to type them to get the spelling correct. Something that I need to work on. I get people asking me how I got in to college with my pathetic spelling, well I use spell check before handing in homework. Most websites spell checkers aren't JAWS user friendly. So it takes a few more steps to Wright spell check and copy and paste info in to edit box. But I do think that all people no matter what your excuse is should know how to spell or should at least try.
That's absolutely disgusting that they wrote that blind people can't spell on the website. Most blind people hate stereotypes, and here some stupid blind person is putting one more stereotype out there for the whole world to see.
I'd also like to say that I visit other bulletin boards and belong to some email lists where most of the writers are sighted, and if it is true that blind people can't spell, then neither can sighted people. I'm astonished at the bad spelling I see.
agreed with the last poster; I don't think it's specifically a blindness thing. I'd also like to point out that I don't have useable vision at all, but am a very visual learner. I hope that site gets taken down, though...at least the part about blind people not being able to spell. that's fucking ridiculous!!
I thought it was just me as I am a writer and incorrect spelling drives me crazy. I couldn't believe it either when I read it and yes, its true, that most sighted people, especially kids now days, can't seem to spell or write either. As for doing math? Well, that's such a visual subject anyway and I did mine in black marker and I still hate math that involves letters, algebra, ick!
The site, I can put the address if anyone wants it, is actually listed under the personal websites link on the...
Whitestick
http://www.whitestick.co.uk
website.
I was checking out some of his links in case there were any there I thought I should add to some of my web pages and came across this site. Can't remember whoose it is now, but saved address in case anyone wanted it and no, I think this person is English speaking and not from another country.
As to my mention of switching from English to another language, that part is true for some people. If you are born in a Spanish-speaking country and that's all you know until school, well then your spelling of your own language should be fine. However, when learning another language like English, the letters and sounds are different. Well, not the actual letters, but their placement and meaning. Like we spell the word cat C A T, but in spanish the word cat for the animal by that name is gato, G A T O. I know several people from other countries and helped in some of the ESL, (English as a second language) classes and I've been told that English is one of the hardest languages to learn when coming from a different country or to learn as an adult.
Anyway, I just thought I'd make mention of this strange message that seems to lump us all together.
Um! Math is a visual subject? Off topic, but I disagree. There may be pictures and graphs involved, but tactle graphics and draftsman drawing boards are the best things to help with that. The rest is pretty much equations and tables, which don't sound visual to me.
Anyhow, like I said before, e-mails to the site owner should be sent to take this disclaimer down. It's such a terrible generalization.
I've heard English is one of the most difficult languages for people to learn if it's not their native tongue. I'm a spelling and grammar freak myself, and I agree with Raven. This is just a bunch of bullshit.
Actually, the standard of spelling has gone down in recent years for both blind and sighted.
Kids aren't getting enough time in class these days learning how to spell and read, and it's not uncommon for quite a few kids turning up at highschool with the reading level of a 7 year old.
For blind people I think it's a bit different, and i think it depends on how much braille a kid has used. I personally don't think technology beyond braille should be introduced to a child until late primary or early highschool, because it doesn't help kids with spelling at all, in fact, it introduces the idea of, if it sounds right, it must be right. Using braille means a child must learn how the word is spelt by actually writing it down rather than typing it, and must learn the sounds of the letters by reading and pronouncing it themselves rather than having jaws do it for them.]
Hmm, to the poaster above, that's one solution to the problem, empractical as it may be. I really think the key here is getting people to read more, to appreciate the written word more. Out of 40000 official english words its something like 2000 that are used moste frequently. Even these are often spelled wrong or not used in propper context.
I've been struggling with spelling and some grammer issues my self. In my case, I didn't truely learn to read all that well until seventh grade. I could read before this point but all my efforts were based on trying to figure out what the symbols ment in print and braille, not actually how to comprehend. Or, even how to spell words. Audio books were my only workable means of enjoying a book, or doing class work and thus, I downplayed the value of braille because it frustrated me to such a degree. Now, I'm stuck with an expansive vocabulary and limited by the lack of propper spelling being drilled into my head. Often, I substitute a word I'd rather use for one I can spell just because there isn't time to learn how to spell it right when I need it.
These things are introduced in early primary school for a reason. They are primary fundimentals that everyone should know.
All this being said, I'm makeing an effort to improve my spelling. When I spell check something, I often have jaws repeat the correct spelling and I'll write it out 5 or ten times when I've the time to doo it.
If only I'd have known, it would have been alot easier to doo back then. If I could have looked past my frustrations and done everything in my power to find the support I'd needed.
So, in a way, I think I've come to value the printed word more than moste because I struggled to comunicate with it. That was one of the more frustrateing things in my education. I wasn't really given a means to write out my thoughts, to read them back and to share in the reading of others thoughts and ideas. One would argue that listening and dictateing are equal to reading and writing but their not at all.
How do you make a rough draft and go threw the complete reviseing process when you have an ornery teacher/student that wants the assignment done as soon as possible and isn't willing to give you more than one stab at it?
How do you look back at your work later when it comes time to review for an exam?
I don't know that I'll return to braille even though I should but, I'm glad its there none the less so others have an oppertunity to learn spelling and grammer at an early age along with the rest of the students in their classes.
More thoughts, I believe one should make an effort to revise what they've written. They should make a further effort when they are doing something on a professional level or creating something that will be viewed by thousands that represents themself or a group... I know on bords I don't go full out to clean up my postes but this guys sight is horibly horibly composed.
I hope I never create a personally owned or professional sight that has that many errors.
I did send an email to the site owner about this generalization. However, I haven't seen any response yet.
You don't have to see to spell...that is bullshit. And, off topic, but math is taught visually...I've had to teach myself.
Foil method indeed!
the thing about reading an audio book is that it doesn't teach you how things are written down. and even with jaws, a lot of people don't choose to actually read letter by letter if they need to, that's why braille is so good. and it's not impractical.
Most australian students have all their texts in braille in primary school. technology is not introduced to them, and it's discouraged as a persons main mode of producing work until they reach highschool, so that they learn to read and write correctly.
Unfortunately, some other countries seem to be taking the easy way, rather than the way that teaches people the benifits of having correct spelling.
I think audio is fine but students must be first introduced to braille to encourage reading and writing skills.
I agree with Australia's teaching method then.
And it's not just a lack of time spent in class learning how to spell and read, it's also a lack of time at home spent reading. Many students' parents don't have or make time to help their children with homework, so they end up having to teach themselves or not learning at all or enough.
Audio will never be equal with physical print or braille. That's a load of snozshwazsh.
When I read an audio or braille book, I often write down words that I've never heard before or don't know the meanings of, and I'll run them through a spell checker and look them up later. I am quite the grammar and writing freak, so I often check things three or four times before I post them or turn them in.
Oh yeah, and Chastity, kudos to you for e-mailing the site owner.
Yes brille is the best method, and I read with brille offten as possible. No, I'm not the best speller, but it's not a blind issue, it is simply and issue. Lol. I get lazy like the worst or best of us, so. Tech should be kept out of school until later I do agree. Learn math, spelling, and all other subjects manually, then after that get the tech.Messing, text, or other is why kids don't spell. You just say brb ppl an se u lt. Lol
Think about how many people read their braille in grade 2 though? IIt's astonishing all of the contractions that are used. I myself, for instance, had no idea the word "immediate" was spelled as such, since the braille contraction for it is i m m.
I'm in no way arguing that blind people are less capable of spelling, I'm simply pointing out one important fact that may cause for a blind person to be slightly behind in spelling.
I agri wath everything dat everyone has sad so far. Just because you're blaind doesn't min dat you can knot spill. Blainness may provent you from clinning up aphter yourself and/or taking care of yourself, but os the blaind fux don't have prablems wath spilling stuff.
Lol at the last post.
See? It is things like this disclaimer on that site that give blind people some of these stereotypes. That is horrible, and it needs to go away before too many people see it.
I think every braille user in school should read and write uncontracted braille and be fluent in it before learning contracted braille. I didn't know how to spell words like Spirit, immediate, necessary, according, and character until I was in seventh grade, and had to spell them out on the computer keyboard more often. That's pretty sad.
Yes, and it pisses me off when we, the blind community, shoot ourselves in the foot. Even if it was a joke...I'm not laughing.
This is just ridiculous. It's one thing to say you can't spell, but to say all blind people are bad spellers is bullshit. I personally do know a lot of blind people who can't spell very well, and it annoys me. I agree about the Braille contractions, but I learned to type on the computer when I was about 8 and knew Braille for a few years before that, so I never had trouble spelling things in grade 1 or 2.
if you want to see some spelling errors, go to the discovery sight. they are supposed to be an educational tv network but it is rife with errors. well two or three, but that disgusts me.
If you're going to take the time to put up a site, send an Email, write an essay, ETC., it takes only minutes longer to edit it. Call me harsh if you want, but I believe that failure to edit is just plain lazy.
I mentioned in another thread a lot of misspellings among blind I've seen are pronunciation-related. I don't really mind when someone misspells accessible as accessable or some other piffling error but when someone writes members as 'mimbers' or blender as blinder that gets to me pretty quick. I've also seen brordband (broadband) and orction (auction) which initially confused me until I thought that people from the UK probably wouldn't be able to tell whether a word used R without learning how it's spelled first because of their accent.
I really think, in a lot of cases, it is the fault of schools who just don't spend enough time on the issue.
TV.com has a few as well I think.
Sorry to say this, but Jess is right about the schools. As someone who "slipped through the cracks" of the system I take a firm stance against the system.
Many times, the system at large feels that they are not properly equiped to deal with the blind and so they pass the buck so to speak.
A lot of blind students who go to public school, and have a teaching assistant with them will often get that the worst, because a lot of teachers assume that the assistant is teaching the student everything he or she has to know. Never mind that Teaching Assistant does not mean teacher.
I was forced to have an ade from 5th to 7th grade and then high school. It gave teachers a "ah, the blind kid" atitude.
It just made my teachers lazy. Lol.
It also made me lazy...but I digress.
Yes...unfortunately, it did make me lazy too, but that has nothing to do with me being blind. Lol. I was just a very lazy kid.
Yup, so was I and I pay the price.
I wonder if that's partly why so many people use that stupid text shorthand these days even when writing Emails and things. I myself refuse to use it and not merely because it drives me crazy when Window-Eyes tries to read it. I've actually ignored people who sent me Quicknotes or messages consisting of what I perceive to be too much of that. But I wonder if spelling problems could be partly why people do that.
It's possible. It's interesting how the subject of short hand almost always comes up in a topic about spelling. In some cases, I think this is even worse. At least the people who make some honest mistakes have tried to spell somewhat. I was actually told once that short hand was mainly a visual thing because it was easier to look at, or something like that, but I don't know if I can believe that, because I've come across many blind people who type the same way.
So have I, but I added sighted folks in my example not only because they often do the same thing but also in order not to come across as making a blanket statement. But I have definitely known a lot of blind folks, some of them on here, who do that.
I wish they wouldn't separate Braille and technology, that part really grinds me.
Because of access to a Braille display I read more braille now than I ever did in the unglory days of yore, when what you got came from the Great White masters deciding what the blind may or may not be interested in.
So I want to read a technology review, a hobby site on remote control cars and their engines, I can. I don't have to hear from Miz Pringle, (and that misspelling had nothing to do with being blind), about how the blind don't need to read this or that because they can't assemble this or that ...
By way of example, I bought a book on oscillator / envelope construction as a teenager, and submitted it to their Braille transcription services, even offered to just show up and pay in cash for the deal up front if I could get it done. It was one of those things you wouldn't want someone to read to you, as the details required you look it over many times. The cash was summarily rejected and I was told no blind person could construct or assemble this, she didn't even understand what it was and I for one, had in fact done some of it before. That was then, and this is now:
If I want similar materials for anything, I can read it online and in Braille without the interference of said middleware sensor.
So, Braille plus technology equals greater access to greater amounts of material. Because of technology, I don't misspell the odd names of stores or products anymore, as I can read modern periodicals and their websites.
Those people who do this new Braille Challenge thing, and similar stuff, seem to be on the right track. I say seem to as I'm not there, and have just read a little on the Internet.
To me any supposed blindness organization making as they call initiatives ought to show some initiative, come up with a funding situation so you kids get Braille displays. Done all the time for wheelchairs and the like, and as I said somewhere else, there are initiatives or whatever elsewhere to provide the deaf with TTYs and the like.
I've heard the complaint Grade Two users don't know how to spell because of the symbols used as words or partial words, but if you must type out your work, you will master that. I'm not saying with a typewriter: most of that becomes a mechanical exercise in attempt to be error free, with little actual learning of the material going on. However maybe use a QWERTY keyboard at least part of the time, so as to generate proper output.
Using real-time feedback on a Braille display does really help, at least for me, as I have a propensity to turn things around, and have never been able to master that, but can generally see it with Braille and subsequently fix it.
As to spelling in general, there are shocking misspellings in commercially available books from some fairly large publishers. I don't know what the problem with it all is, but I don't think it's related to our vision hardware / biology, except that if you must use speech by itself, checking spelling is much harder than it is with a Braille display.
oh robozerk that is horrible about the assembly stuff. what nerve.
have you ever heard of smith kettlewell? my husband got their publications for a long time and one of the first things we did as a dating couple was build a kit for an locator like we discussed in another email. i learned to solder and all that good stuff. very fun and romantic to make something together.
the whole blind people and spelling goes down to a basic difference in philosophy. Some people view this problem, as an excuse not to do better. you know " i can't because...." others take the attitude that it is something to improve.
Oh for the record, many many people with normal vision can't spell worth beans. It's basically because english "doesn't play fair." Their attitude is Who has the time or the brain space to remember all those rules about "i before e except after c." Thais is why the spell checker is the most commonly used accessory in word processiors.
oh for heavens sake, i just saw someone else's comment. so if a contributir to a board discussion is a poor speller, you will not read his or her thoughts? my my my, Don't we have the superior attitude. The content not the construction of a message is my only criteria. If you are so judgmental and intelligent that this totally ruins your day, do yourself a favor and keep your thoughts a secretIt only makes you look bad.
Yeah. I don't understand why some people are so uptight about spelling that they can't appreciate what said person has to contribute. That being said, if you are going to contribute to the written world, you might want to work on your spelling, if you know that is an issue for you. There are ways to learn, and I'm sorry, but if someone's spelling is so bad that I can't understand what they are trying to say, I'm going to bring it up. That doesn't mean I won't consider their views, however. But the assumption that we can't spell because we can't see the words is just plain ridiculous.
As I say, some people are all puckered up about many things. Spelling is important, but don't be an ass.
if someone has extremely bad spelling, I will not read what they've written, or tell them to rewrite it. Construction of a message is just as important as content. Just imagine if the spelling problem was a pronunciation issue instead. You wouldn't want to talk with a person who constantly mispronounce several words per sentence, that would get ridiculous.
okay first, i agree with other posters, in that it's not just blind people who can't spell. sighted people can't either, and if English is not your first language, it makes spelling in English harder. second, while i admit to being a very bad speller, try living with both parents who are dislexic, and one who couldn't read or write until he was in his 20's, (not his fault it's just how it was back then if the kid couldn't keep up, the teachers just left them behind, plus having a sick mother and having to drop out of school to take care of her, didn't help either). anyway, i learn things quicker through audio, and because most of the braille they made me learn, was that stupid contraction stuff, i didn't really kno how to spell better than i used to, until i made the people who taught me braille write it all out long handed. i still have bad spelling now, but it's not from lazyness though. infact, i try really hard to not spell incorrectly...maybe to hard, acording to some. as for math, my problem was never the braille part, but the, "do it in your head" part, and still is.
Don't get me started about math...but my spelling only got better thanks to the computer.
Yes, the computer greatly improved my spelling too, but of course, like everyone else, I still make errors here and there. That's where the edit part comes into play.
Sometimes with the computer it's more typing errors than spelling errors. If you type fast, that's bound to happen once in awhile.
the computer has helped me a tun as well: nevertheless, it is not the end all to it all. I realised after getting my pac mate from visual service that I am not as good at spelling as I thought I was. I know I was a horable, and still am but not so much, speller. Being able to go back and read with a braille display really helped me see how I was writeing things wrong that JAWS or spell check didn't help with. It was mainly things like write, W R I T E. I was spelling it W R I G H T. When i saw it on the braille display, I realised I was spelling it incorrectly.
Oh yeah, Braille displays are lifesavers. In fact, if I'm spell checking something, I like to read it as opposed to actually using the spell checker on the computer. the spell checker absolutely annoys me. I don't care how many times I click on change all if a word is repeatedly misspelled, it only does it that one time. But maybe that's just my crappy computer, who knows. I don't really need a spell checker (yes I know how incredibly pompous that just sounded) but I have a couple friends who are well...not very good spellers, and ask me to read over their stuff from time to time. I really don't mind it as long as they don't go overboard and abuse my willingness to help.
The thing about spell checkers is that it doesn't pick up on a lot of misspelled words that are actually the correct spelling for another word. For example, bath instead of math. They are getting better, but they're still not as good as manual editing.
That's true too, and it won't pick words up that have several spellings either, like there and their.
No, but grammar checks will pick up on those ones, most of the time.
And, you can use such software as an actual learning tool rather than a lazy way out.
Yeah, that's the only downside to just having a spell checker and not a spelling and grammar checker on notetakers. When there's just a spell checker, the document has to be double proofread to ensure that all or most mistakes are caught.