Computers provide many advantage for people with reading and writing difficulties. One of the greatest advantages is the ability to proof-read work before submitting. Using various tools designed for people with dyslexia and other print impairments, once can be confident that once a document has been checked and corrections made it will be readable and of a high-quality.
The spellecheck facility provides the first stage in a successful proof-read. Most words that have been misspelled should be picked up by a spellechecker such as the one included in Microsoft Word or the specialist flexible spell checkers found in programs like TextHelp Read & Write.
Hearing your document read back to you using synthetic speech has two main functions for proof-reading. The first is that any grammatical anomalies can be spotted. The second use is that incorrect words that are spelt correctly, such as Glass instead of Class, could be heard and corrected. The use of text-to-speech software that supported text highlighting is particularly useful when tracking down errors.
Because of their nature, neither the spell checker nor text-to-speech will highlight homophone errors. For this you will need to use a specialist homophone checker.
