Spell Checker For Desktop Application

[Prathamesh]

Hello All,
I need a spell checker utility that will highlight all the misspelled word including label, button and grid title,menu, As i’ am finding it difficult by every time copying my contents in word for checking the spelling while Blackbox testing the application.
Help me out of this.

[Jesper]

Interesting, I have never seen any tool that can copy labels and button text out of an application as text.

I sounds to me the application you are testing doesn’t have buttons and labels in a language you know well enough to spot spell’in errosr…

Perhaps you can go another way about it, and locate the actual labels, button texts etc in a config/property file. Then both spell check to config file, and test the rendering and test that all buttons do get a value. That is how I have seen it done in the development tools I have touched.

/Jesper

[Neil]

Hi Prathamesh,

I understand the task that you’re trying to complete. Like Jesper, I don’t know of anything which can check spelling of compiled apps through the UI. (Even if such a tool existed, it wouldn’t be able to identify all linguistic problems, e.g. it wouldn’t be able to identify bad grammar or confusing language.)

What about labels which aren’t easy to trigger in the application – for instance, labels which only occur when there are errors? Do you know how to provoke every single error message in your application? If this is a task which you really need to complete, I would suggest reviewing these strings in your source code might be the best chance of finding all messages.

However, I think you also need to consider what the risk is here. How confident are you that you can identify most spelling mistakes with the naked eye (or know someone else who could do this)? If your application shipped with a spelling mistake, what would be the impact on your business? How much time/effort is it going to cost you to complete this spell-checking task? From my experience (and I say this with a background of being a journalist!) most spelling mistakes are not really going to impact a user, although if there are a large number of spelling mistakes then this could give your application the appearance of being unprofessional. Still, this is only really a severe problem if your business stakes its reputation on accurate spelling, e.g. if you’re making a website for a school or a law firm.

If a spelling mistake is discovered after release, this sort of issue is normally treated as a “trivial” problem with low priority. Now, compare this to what might happen if a serious functional issue is raised, because you were spending too much time worrying about spelling rather than black-box testing. I would suggest talking to your team, to see if they agree that your black-box testing might be more important.

Good luck!

[Prathamesh]

Thank you, Jesper and Neil for ur suggestions

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