English spelling is not easy and is full of many spelling irregularities. The word GHOTI is a constructed example word used to illustrate these irregularities, since the official pronunciation of the word is counter-intuitive and is pronounced like the word “fish”.
Ghotit was founded by people with dyslexia. Ghotit’s mission is to improve the overall quality of life of a person with dyslexia. Ghotit is not a treatment for dyslexia. It’s a set of services that assists adults and kids to overcome their writing and reading difficulties by helping to convert their poorly spelled written limitations to mainstream English.
Kids and adults with learning disabilities, like dyslexia and dysgraphia, are heavy users of spell checkers. However, standard spell and grammar checkers address the needs of the general population, who demonstrates average spelling and whose spelling mistakes are typing errors resulting in a spelling that shows high resemblance to the requested word. These spell checkers produce low results for users who demonstrate poor English spelling such as people with dyslexia, due to:
- The written word spelling is ‘too far’ from the correct spelling
- No support for confused/out-of-context words – the written word is a real-word that is spelled correctly but is used in the wrong context
- No assistance provided to the user in selecting the correct candidate word
Focusing on the problems listed above, the Ghotit team has developed unique spelling algorithms which are at the core of the services Ghotit is developing for the people with dyslexia or dysgraphia and other types of learning difficulties.