Improved spell check

We’ve rolled out a wide range of improvements to the spelling test today:

Spellings are now classified

Unrecognized spellings are now classified by their severity, with the most obvious spelling errors appearing first:

Potential spelling errors include unrecognized words which look like a person or company’s name.

Incorrect case highlights words which appear to be correctly spelled, but with the incorrect case, e.g. “iPhone” written as “IPhone”.

Lastly, we list Invisible spelling errors, which includes unrecognized words in alternative text, meta tags, and more.

Automatic language detection

Previously you had to tell Silktide all of the languages that all of your pages used, and if you got this wrong, you could see foreign words flagged as spelling errors.

Silktide now detects when a page appears to be in a language different from what you told it, and will test using that language automatically.

Note that this detection can’t guess regional variations – for example, US or UK English – so you should still tell Silktide what languages you are aiming to use. But if you forgot you had (say) a Spanish page, Silktide will fix that for you.

More help with obscure errors

When a spelling error appears in an invisible area of the page, Silktide now provides more information to help understand what is going on.

For example, if an error is only visible to screen readers, or appears inside a page title, Silktide will explain this and highlight the relevant code.

Better tooltips

Tooltips now explain where the error occurs, and the best-guess to fix it:

Clearer buttons

The Approve button confused many users, and has now been renamed Learn. We’ve also added an Ignore button inside the Inspector, which makes it faster to ignore a spelling without adding it to your dictionary.

Improved scoring

Because spellings are now broken down into multiple categories, Silktide can now offer more nuanced scoring than before. The spelling score now consists of:

• 60% likely spelling errors
• 20% potential spelling errors
• 10% incorrect case
• 10% invisible errors

Previously, if say “LinkedIn” was written as “Linkedin” inside alternative text on every page, this would result in a terrible spelling score for the whole website. With the new test, such a minor issue would have a much smaller impact on your score.

Using the new test

The new interface takes effect immediately for all customers. However, your spellings won’t be fully classified (as shown above) until you re-test your website.