English teachers would march in the streets. I have to admit I would join them, because I secretly believe that spelling is one of the few things I can do better than my students. Instead of changing the spelling of words, we have ensured that everyone can spell correctly by having the computer do it for us. Instead of introducing order into chaos, we have perpetuated and canonized our byzantine spellings by making them simple to reproduce. Concurrently, our attitude toward spelling has changed.
Spelling is taught less and less in schools.
Our solution isn't perfect. As I see every day in students' papers, computers can't read minds. They can't distinguish between it's and its , roll and role , principle and principal , breeches and breaches , deference and difference , or for that matter, identify as wrong any word that incorrectly appears as another word. But there's room for improvement. Remaining ones, as well as homonyms, could be dealt with by an advanced spell check that queried all genuinely ambiguous cases.