We have a vernacular spelling dictionary that works in LibreOffice. Could we add a feature that would make it work in Bloom?
The words were simply copied and pasted out of our FLEx lexicon. It would be nice to have a way to either connect FLEx (or WeSay? I don’t use that too much myself but maybe others do) and Bloom directly, or else use the kind of file LibreOffice uses.
My sense is that the most useful kind of spell-check for the situations we work in is one that shows squiggly lines under the words that are incorrect, instead of the kind where you have to remember to press a button and it goes through the whole publication.
Having a spell-checker like this would save a lot of time and hassle proof-reading and help people learn to spell more quickly too.
The most likely path to spell checking a language is a list of all the wordforms in the language. This might be feasible to compile for languages on the isolating end of the spectrum. Do we have such lists?
We already compile lists of vernacular words in the process of developing the decodable text tool for a language. That could jumpstart a spell-checking dictionary. Perhaps there could be an easy “add to dictionary” option in Bloom.
It occurs to me that if one compiled a word list and set up decodable stages using the allowed words option, Bloom would flag words not in the word list–which would mean that either a) the word just isn’t in the list yet, or b) the word is misspelled. That would be a sort of spell checker. This is, of course, incompatible with using the decodable text tool for its intended purpose.
