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A designer who has dyslexia has created a font to help dyslexic readers navigate text, designing letters in a way that avoids confusion and adds clarity. And in England, two researchers are compiling a dictionary that favors meaning over alphabetical order.

Roughly 10 percent of the world's population is dyslexic. And as NPR's Nancy Shute reported in 2012, "People with dyslexia are often bright and verbal, but have trouble with the written word."

The people behind two new projects hope they can help change that.

Dutch designer Christian Boer's Dyslexie font has been around for a while, but it's been getting new attention thanks to being featured in the Istanbul Design Biennial.

The font defaults to a dark blue color, which Boer's website says "is more pleasant to read for dyslexics."

"When they're reading, people with dyslexia often unconsciously switch, rotate and mirror letters in their minds," Boer tells British design magazine Dezeen. "Traditional typefaces make this worse, because they base some letter designs on others, inadvertently creating 'twin letters' for people with dyslexia."

To avoid confusion, Boer designed letters that have a heavier bottom half, making it less likely that a reader might flip them. He also made some openings larger, and slightly tilted some letters that closely resemble others – such as a "b" and a "d."

In that sense, Boer's font uses a similar approach to another font developed with dyslexics in mind. OpenDyslexic is a free, open-sourced font that's also designed to help prevent confusion, as NPR reported last year.

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Graphic designer Christian Boer's Dyslexie font is being featured at the Istanbul Design Biennial. Dyslexie hide caption

itoggle caption Dyslexie

Graphic designer Christian Boer's Dyslexie font is being featured at the Istanbul Design Biennial.

Dyslexie

Dyslexie also incorporates more space between letters and words, to help prevent a dyslexic reader from seeing a confused jumble of text.

Boer's font works with both Apple and Microsoft-based systems; it can also be added to a web browser as an extension. The font is free for home users and available for a fee to schools and businesses.

It's not clear what font education researchers Neville and Daryl Brown will use for their new dictionary, which will cater to dyslexic readers' needs. The father-and-son team say the project builds on decades of research — and the understanding that the standard dictionary isn't very helpful for dyslexics.

Instead of using a strict alphabetical order, words in their dictionary will be organized according to their meanings, as the pair explained in a recent article in British newspaper the Litchfield Mercury.

"We teach literacy using an entirely different method to phonics, instead using the 'morphological approach' which was developed by my father over 30 years ago," Daryl Brown says.

So far, they've organized nearly 50,000 words, sorting them by some 3,700 morphemes.

"For another example, the traditional dictionary places the words signature, resign and assignation many pages apart," the Mercury reports. "But they are connected by the common morpheme 'sign', pronounced differently across the three words."

The two researchers recently told BBC London that they've been working on the dictionary since 1982, when their research school, Maple Hayes Hall, was founded. They hope to finish the book by the end of 2015.

dictionaries

Dyslexia

Microsoft — a company most associated with Word documents and Excel spreadsheets — is getting a makeover.

Under new leadership, the software developer is analyzing vast troves of data about its users to create social tools for the workplace. They've got the goods — just think of all those Office emails that bind us together — but the question is, will customers want to cozy up socially with Microsoft, on and off the job?

Old Data, New Strategy

"Microsoft: the social network" is, at first glance, a strange idea. But it makes a kind of sense. While Facebook may have the best map of our personal relationships, Microsoft has the best map of our work lives.

"What drives me, is for you to be able to get more out of every moment of your life," says Satya Nadella, Microsoft's new CEO. "You want to be able to create a document, get to a meeting, be productive in the meeting, have your notes taken in the meeting automatically for you."

While many companies block social media sites in the workplace, companies pay Microsoft to be on the inside, and to store internal documents, calendar items, meeting notes and attendees, contacts and more.

According to a recent quarterly earnings report, more than 1 billion people use Office — that's 1 out of every 7 people on Earth. With just a bit of Big Data analysis, Microsoft could create social tools to help users decide what and who is important to them.

"In a world of abundance of computing, the only thing scarce is human attention," Nadella says. "And our job is to be able to help you get more out of those moments of your life."

And "those moments" don't have to be just from 9 to 5 — Nadella says he wants users to get as much out of the programs in the personal lives as they do at work.

Microsoft is racing to get its web-based version of Office, which is called Office 365, on every smartphone and tablet — which they recently decided to do for free.

That way, Microsoft's personal assistant can follow you everywhere and get more personal. For example, it could integrate your GPS location with your to-do list so that when you step inside your home, you get a reminder.

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Microsoft's Gurdeep Singh Pall spoke with reporters last week at the company headquarters in Redmond, Wash. He explained how Microsoft would analyze data to figure out a user's priorities. Brian Smale/Microsoft hide caption

itoggle caption Brian Smale/Microsoft

Microsoft's Gurdeep Singh Pall spoke with reporters last week at the company headquarters in Redmond, Wash. He explained how Microsoft would analyze data to figure out a user's priorities.

Brian Smale/Microsoft

"These are the things that I should be talking to my daughter about or showing her these things," Nadella says. "That's the idea — of being able to be contextually aware."

Smarter Services

Last week, Nadella invited a handful of journalists to company headquarters in Redmond, Wash., to hear the game plan and meet the managers who will make this happen.

Gurdeep Singh Pall explains that as Microsoft mines the data, it can figure out your priorities. Say you're about to delete an invite to a party, he says. Microsoft might alert you: "Don't delete it, because this happens to be a company party, and this message was sent to a lot of important people in the company."

Julie Larson-Green says that if she wanted to meet with two co-workers who were in different locations, "it can do smart suggestions on where would be best place for us to meet given the time of day, the traffic, the distance between our locations."

Microsoft wants these social features to work inside and outside a company's walls, so that when you jump into a meeting with outsiders, you're prepared.

Nadella also says his group is firm on the revenue model for these projects.

"We're clear that it's about subscriptions," he says. "We want to have a subscription offer, which is for every individual and every organization. And it's not about advertising."

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Business Is Not Personal

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But Al Hilwa, an analyst with IDC who used to work at Microsoft, says there could be pitfalls if users aren't given enough control.

"Using Office 365 can't be like using Facebook," Hilwa says. "That doesn't make sense, and that would be a big problem."

Hilwa says that our professional lives are different from our online identities, and that information on Facebook may typically gets shared with everyone, it can't work that way in a workplace.

"If users are in charge of controlling what bits and pieces of facts they can let out, as far as their social graph, then maybe I could see how this might work," Hilwa says.

A key challenge for Microsoft, he says, will be to figure out how to share discretely, without being creepy or irritating.

Big Data

workplace

Microsoft

One of my favorite arguments — and one I've had in just about every even numbered year since the seventies — is about when to stop talking about politics. A surprising number of people think that since elections are on Tuesday, by Saturday all that can be said has been said, and nothing more should be said.

As a person who's covered politics for decades, I don't believe that. Saturday after the election and the Saturday after that are good days to talk politics. And we need to talk.

We've just done it again — played another round in our biennial ping pong match in which we deliver a stinging rebuke to people in power, vote lots of the other guys into office, and then two or sometimes four years later, we send another strong message — "you weren't listening" — deliver a serious blow to the new guys, and vote the others back. And, as discouraged citizens repeatedly tell reporters, nothing changes.

In fact, the debate does change, the issues and the emphasis do change. The stories covered in the news change as the new leaders put their party's gloss on events and how to respond. As we know, there are major differences on big issues: immigration, taxes, trade, and health insurance.

But those policy debates, while important, seem to be removed from the daily lives of American citizens.

Something that's very big in those daily lives has not changed for a very long time, and that is income. Wages have been stagnant for years, decades. So when politicians and analysts tell us that unemployment is down, jobs are up and the stock market is going up and down but mostly up — when we hear numbers that say the economy is improving, too many Americans still say, "not my economy."

Common sense would seem to dictate that if there are ways to restore prosperity, good jobs and bigger paychecks to all these good hard working people, our leaders should talk. They should confer and consult and maybe even compromise — maybe deliver at least some of what voters want.

We've heard from leaders that they plan to talk and look for common ground. Now, we wait for a couple of years and see if this time they really mean it.

Only twice in American history has a son followed his father into the presidency. The first was John Quincy Adams. The second, George W. Bush, has now written a biography of his father, George H.W. Bush. It's called "41: A Portrait of My Father."

The 43rd president of the United States traces the life of the 41st from his youth in New England through his entry into the Texas oil business, combat during World War II, party politics, diplomacy, the White House, retirement — and skydiving.

In a wide-ranging interview with Morning Edition's David Greene, former President George W. Bush discusses his father's life and legacy, and their relationship. He also addresses some of the major decisions of his own time in office, and the possibility of a third President Bush, if his brother, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, decides to run in 2016.

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George H.W. Bush holds a young George W. in New Haven, Conn., in April 1947. Getty Images hide caption

itoggle caption Getty Images

George H.W. Bush holds a young George W. in New Haven, Conn., in April 1947.

Getty Images

Interview highlights

DAVID GREENE: What do you think when people compare the two wars [in Iraq] and say that your father's approach was wiser?

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: I can understand that and I ask them to read the book and —

You can understand that?

Yeah, I mean I think — sure — I think people can — you know I can understand the comparisons between he and me. I mean it's — it's a way to do things. I don't agree necessarily that wiser or not wiser because the situation was different and in many ways more complex.

ON JEB BUSH'S POSSIBLE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL RUN

I mean, the environment is what it is. You don't get to rewrite the environment, and so Jeb has to think about whether or not he wants to be president, just like Hillary Clinton has to think about whether she wants to be president. Some guy at one time said to me, 'You know, I don't like the idea of Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Bush.' I said, 'Oh, OK.' I said, 'How do you like the idea of Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Clinton?' And the point is that these may be the two best candidates their party has to offer.

ON RELATIONS WITH RUSSIAN PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN

I did work to get Ukraine and Georgia to have a process to get into NATO, and Putin didn't like it. The truth of the matter is Putin doesn't like much of what the United States does these days."

But would your father have done that or do you think he would have said, you know, 'I need to be more careful about provoking Russia?'

41

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by George W. Bush

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Yeah, I don't think — I think at some point in time he would have recognized — I don't know. You know he wasn't there. And it's obviously a different time and a different period and a different leader. It seemed like to me, and in many ways Gorbachev recognized that the Soviet was doomed — and it seems like to me at times Vladimir Putin was to restate the Soviet — reinstate the Soviet.

ON HIS FATHER'S LIFE NOW

He's joyful. Ninety years old. He can't walk, but he sure can laugh and smile, and — he is — the basic things of life make him very content — his wife, Barbara, his children and his grandchildren.

ON THE FAILINGS OF HIS FATHER'S 1992 RE-ELECTION CAMPAIGN

I was very disappointed, not in him, but in the process. And he gave — he did give a flat speech [at the 1992 Republican National Convention] and it frankly wasn't full of many interesting ideas. It was kind of defensive. And there's a couple of lessons there about this moment. One is — is that if you're gonna give a big speech, get it written early and get used to it.

Get comfortable with it?

Get comfortable with it because it enhances the delivery. And secondly, that if you expect to win political races, you better have strong policy platform. And they were playing — they were kind of playing small ball at this point, and presidents have got to have bigger agendas.

John Quincy Adams

Saddam Hussein

Vladimir Putin

George H.W. Bush

George W. Bush

Hillary Clinton