Hi.
I honestly think spelling matters a lot. Especially when it comes to writing posts on new games in the new releases room or the articles room or the main page.
It's okay for people to make mistakes when writing in a informal forum like the off topic forum, but when we have a new release or a news post to me, spelling errors are a big no no. Oh sure if you make a couple then that's fine, but at least either put your post through a spell checker or listen with your screen reader. I think dark wrote about this before and basically said he didn't have time to run through the spell checker or that the HTML would interfere with the spell checker. I disagree with that, if you're going to run a forum then at least spell correctly and use the correct punctuation.

yes there might have been spelling errors in my post but I'm not important in this forum, well okay maybe my opinions are but I mean I don't run it as in write reviews and updates for games and things like that.
Also as for the HTML. write your post in one notepad window. then copy and paste it into the body of the page.

In addition to what has been written above, misspelling also effects the site in google search rankings. Also, you can tell who actually reads as opposed to those who just use speech as their primary way of interacting with text and computers.

Practising and maintaining good spelling and grammar retains your ability to write perfectly in the long run. I know many perfectionists would feel let down when they feel they cannot make every single thing perfect.

The Firefox and NVDA spelling checker has saved me from hundreds, if not thousands, of sloppy typos. I know that Dark personally uses Dolphin Hal as his screen reader and I am unsure of what it reports as far as spelling errors are concerned. I know that NVDA reports spelling errors if they are flagged by a spelling checker. So if I just read my post through with NVDA, I can correct all the spelling errors it sees. It doesn't get much easier than that.

Ugh no, I turned off auto correct on my Mac because it was driving me mad. If you deal with unusual spellings such as names of people and places from games a lot it gets really, really annoying.

What I have liked to see was autocorrecting tools for teens. I'm not sure what kind of an algorithm would be needed, or if one already exists, but it would detect things that teens like to use and it will change it automatically so that no one will complain, especially people of older generations.

Hi.
I don't mind things like U for you and R for Are and itz instead of it's. and once you know the text speak as people like to call it, it's easy as well. I don't mind that and can put up with it. What I do mind is important topics on any webpage not only audiogames.net, that have spelling mistakes in them.

Oh and one thing that really really bugs me is than and then. Then it began to rain. On my birthday it was hotter than hell. okay crappy examples but that's all I can come up with for now. I really don't get how people can get those two words confused. I've seen it so many times in stories, in blog posts, sometimes on here too. I can understand if English isn't your first language but for those that speak English as there first language and do not have a learning difficulty like dyslexia, for example, O just don't get it.

Anyway to wrap this up, yes I do believe spelling is very important when it comes to news posts and updating the DB. But not so much on the off topic forum and other places like that.

Thanks for someone pointing the spellcheck function in firefox. I honestly didn't know about it until today lol. So thanks again, no more horrible spelling from arq, well, hope not!

you don't need anything, just make sure that report spelling errors is checked in document formatting. I am pretty sure that the dictionary supports different languages; just right click in an edit field and choose the language option.

I agree with AlexM94. If people aren't willing to write three letters, then autocorrect would do it. Think about this. Would you feel pissed off if the person wrote the letter U, but autocorrect changed it to y o u? You would never know if the person actually wrote y-o-u or just u, because in either case the spell checker would have corrected it. Also, machines aren't smart enough to insert punctuations for you, and I don't like how Internet Explorer and NVDA don't work together, so that's why a third party made something that would work, but Microsoft had to put those stuff in because of competition laws.
Anyhow, I think people not only struggle with spelling, but grammar as well, like run-on sentences, not putting commas in the right places, or using too many punctuations than what is necessary, and of course, commonly confused spellings such as they're and their, etc.
Also, I tend to give constructive criticism, not pure criticism so that the person won't feel bad about themselves.

KeyIsFull, as far as I am concerned good spelling and grammar is mandatory for a site maintainer. Especially, for one writing up news articles, game reviews, etc that will be read by the general public. I don't think we can expect everyone on the forum to have good grammar and spelling, but I would expect any news articles, game reviews, and other aspects of the site itself to be properly spell checked and properly edited for errors. There are many reasons for that not the least of which any reasonably educated person who comes along and sees those mistakes are going to come away with a negative opinion of blind people.

Unfortunately, all of us have to face negative stereotypes in one way or another, but when one of us posts a message to a mailing list, a blog, forum, writes a review for a site like audiogames.net that person is a representative of the blind and low vision community. People are not only going to judge that person by what he or she says and does, but that opinion can reflect badly on the rest of the community. Especially, if the majority of posts on that blog, forum, or mailing list  are poorly spelled and have serious grammatical and punctuation errors. At the very least that person will assume blind and low vision people can not spell. However, it is possible they may also assume we are poorly educated, perhaps assume that we are not very smart, and may assume all sorts of other things about us just because we chose not to take spelling and grammar all that serious.

The thing that irritates me most about this sort of debate is none of that has to happen. Spell checkers are a dime a dozen. The three major e-mail clients for Windows such as Microsoft Outlook, Windows Mail, and Thunderbird all have spell checkers. There are free word processors like Jarte with a free spell checker as well. So there is no excuse not to have a spell checker and use it. The only reason more blind and low vision users don't is they simply don't care about their public image or anyone else's.  It is easier to be lazy than spend a minute or two to spell check and proofread what they wrote.

Something else that I have noticed is those who regularly use braille displays tend to be better spellers than those who exclusively depend on speech output. It may be a case of out of sight out of mind, but I think braille displays offer positive reinforcement as far as spelling goes. With text to speech if someone misspells the word "since" as "sinse" the chances are he or she will miss it because most text to speech voices will pronounce both correctly. However, if someone is reading along with a braille display the error will be immediately noticeable. So as the lack of braille literacy increases among the blind its possible that we are seeing that through increased spelling and punctuation errors. I don't know that is going to be something we can solve without forcing blind computer users to be more diligent about spell checking and grammar checking their work with free tools.