Baby Jesus sought separately

RantWoman is contemplating two examples of death by spellchecker. First, RantWoman's email contains both the original posting seeking an "operations manger" and the correction pointing out that of course they are seeking an "operations manAger." This email was sent out to a bunch of language professionals and the people who manage them. RantWoman reports this just to give others courage: we all blunder, so get up dust self off, and try again.

The second example of death by spellchecker is just one of those great English homophones: words spelled differently that sound exactly alike. RantWoman mentions this partly because she knows many blind people, especially blind people who do not read much braille, who spell phonetically. RantWoman suspects that might be the issue in this case and she simply notes that English is a monster sometimes but one still cannot rely only on one's spellchecker.

RantWoman finds this last point humbling for a further reason: RantWoman is THRILLED with how much easier it is to proofread when she lets her screen reader help. RantWoman is almost completely incapable of proofreading text she has been writing and thinks she knows well. After all, RantWoman would just do it right the first time of course. Even when RantWoman does not already know the material, RantWoman suspects that when she reads visually, she does what a fair number of other people she knows also do: her brain just fills in a lot based on some kind of intangible predictive wiring and only occasionally gets brought up short when something in the text severely violates the terms of the prediction. Subtract substantial visual function from either of these practices, and you can imagine the results.

Enter the screen reader. The screen reader catches missed spaces, misspellings, misinterpretations, and all kinds of errors of ommission. The screen reader would NOT catch misued homophones if they are spelled correctly. Rats.