Unspell


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About Unspell---vPWt bnspEl


Unspell offers a phased approach to learning to read English. During the first phase, the student learns a basic, largely phonetic rendition of spoken English—sufficiently simple to be absorbed by even the youngest learners, and designed to work around dyslexia and other learning impediments. It makes learning to read English almost as automatic and effortless as learning to speak it.

Unspell provides the base level of literacy that should be the birthright of every English-speaking person, regardless of ability, motivation, or education.

Very little formal instruction is needed to learn Unspell, and unlike English, there's little concern for so-called "reading level," since the student is immediately able to pronounce most anything put in front of them. Learning to read is de-emphasized in favor of actually reading (and learning things), which makes achieving literacy a largely self-directed and self-motivated activity.

Once students can read unspelled text, they can be gradually introduced to conventional English orthography. This should begin only when each student is developmentally ready, typically between the ages of eight and ten, to handle the flood of idiosyncratic, ambiguous and obsolete spellings.

Copyright Notice


The Unspelled Editions series publishes English-language texts for the exclusive use of print-disabled individuals and their instructors. Unspell is a form of written English that uses an alternative alphabet and a simplified, largely phonetic English orthography which were specifically designed to suit the needs of sighted but print-disabled individuals.

Unspelled texts are of the same nature and intent as books published in Braille. Their publication is allowed under fair use as determined by the United States copyright decision Authors Guild v. HathiTrust, 755 F.3d 87 (2d Cir. 2014) which determined it to be lawful to republish digitized books for accessibility purposes regardless of their copyright status. In that decision, the court ruled that such transformative use of copyrighted works “does not cause the copyright holder to suffer market harm due to the loss of license fees.” The court also noted that, in addition to the applicability of fair use, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and the Chafee amendment (17 U.S.C. § 121) also grant the right to provide access to copyrighted materials to print-disabled users.

Since the purpose of the Unspelled Editions is to serve the needs of print-disabled individuals rather than to profit from their disability, they are placed in the public domain and are free of any copyright. To avoid any appearance of copyright infringement, the Unspelled Editions do not contain any conventionally spelled English text (with the exception of this notice).

About the project's author

I can be contacted via email at dmitry dot orlov at gmail dot com.