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I was thinking, there's a lot of people out there who can't spell. Can we
account for them when designing help systems and manuals?
When using an index to look up information, most literate people will know
at least the first two letters of a word, and will see the correctly spelt
entry nearby in the list, and go to that.
But with natural-language questions and technology for online help like the
Microsoft Office Assistant or Wextech Answer Works, I don't know whether
these recognise misspelt words, and when using these types of tools, if you
enter a key word that it doesn't recognise, it won't know to tell you that
you misspelt the word. As far as it is concerned, you entered a word it
didn't recognise, regardless of whether it has only one letter wrong.
I don't know exactly what kind of recognition ability this technology has
nowadays, so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
I believe some of this technology recognises synonyms, but that is a
separate issue.
What would happen in this situation? Would a user get frustated, give up
and call support? Or would they realise they spelt the word wrong and try
again?
With an index, you could conceivably add common misspellings (hmm, did I
spell that right? :-) of words to accomodate these situations. However, I
wouldn't want to do that, as it would lessen the time I have for more
important tasks, and users might get the impression that their misspelling
is in fact correct.
I presume there is some data out there for commonly misspelled words.
Are there any other situations where the user's difficulty with spelling
might prevent them from getting the help they need? Any ideas for solutions?
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