[stylist] Spell Check/ Jaws Anomalies

[Brad Dunse]

Donna,

MS Word is MS Weird at times. The test on the below sentences:

Did you see how he typed this thing?, You just never know how things 
will go,. I think it is time to do something about this problem.

The only thing it flagged was the question mark  followed by the 
comma after "thing" and then defaulted to the question mark. Then it 
flagged the "You" as being capitol after a comma. It didn't even 
catch the other comma/period issue.

Also I'm using Jaws 12 with Text Analyzer and it didn't catch any of it either.

Brad

On 11/7/2010  11:18 AM Donna Hill said...
>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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Brad Dunse

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