[stylist] Spell Check/ Jaws Anomalies

[Donna Hill]

Hi All,
After Lori mentioned that my synopsis might have a period followed by a 
comma, I was reminded of my ongoing efforts to understand MS Word's 
Spell Check, as it relates to Jaws, and thought you might like to have 
the results of a little experiment.

I have accidentally found similar problems after spell checking and am 
trying to figure out what's going on. First, there are two major ways 
this sort of error is caused. Obviously the period and comma are next to 
each other and it is possible to hit them both at the same time. Also, 
in editing, we move phrases around and sometimes forget to remove a 
period which is no longer at the end of a sentence.

Then, there's the matter of divining how Spell Check is responding to 
this and how the screen reader is reading or not reading Spell Check. I 
did an experiment ending one sentence with a comma followed by a period 
and another with it reversed. Jaws 11 with Word 2003 picked them up as 
punctuation errors, but does not read them in such a way that you know 
what's going on. In the second case, it didn't even say the word and I 
had to tab to the suggestion list to find out what it was referring to 
and what the suggested punctuation was. This is difficult when you have 
complex sentences, but I'm plugging it in to always double-check every 
punctuation mark in a sentence that comes up with a punctuation error. 
Word's suggestions are not reliable. In the case of double punctuation 
marks, it seems to pick the first one as its first suggestion. This was 
true when a comma was followed by a period, even though the next 
sentence started with a capital letter.

Another related matter surfaced when I started reading my book on 
Booksense. There were a few paragraphs which did not have a final 
period. I obviously missed them on Spell Check, and when Jaws read it, 
the paragraph break made it sound like the sentence came to an end, so I 
didn't pick it up there either. The Booksense, however, has a less 
sophisticated document reader and made it sound like a run-on sentence, 
so I now listen for that specifically. Ultimately, I suppose, there's no 
substitute for someone sighted to double-check, but I want to make their 
job as simple as possible. No one is going to pick up everything.
Donna

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