Scrolling, a method for reading music - By Dr David Dendy - OAB Life Member

Reading equipment such as CCTV readers are designed primarily for books, magazines and paperwork. The user (reader) will read a line to the end and then move down to the start of the next, with no break since one is reading to oneself. When reading aloud there is a great difficulty in that you cannot see the beginning of the next line while still reading the end of the present one.

When reading music and playing an instrument the problem is worse because the speed of the music is constant: you must not pause just because you are at the end of a line. RNIB have a service to help VIPs by providing enlarged music, especially for the piano. There are limits to this because as the eyes deteriorate one needs ever larger print.

The problem I faced was: how can I continue singing in a small, house, and choir? I had already given up playing any instrument and conducting. Singing from large print was becoming very difficult and expensive in terms of paper and printer cartridges.

An excellent CCTV reader (the Smartview 7000 from Humanware) became available and I tried this for reading from choir part-books. The problem was still that of reading a book aloud: in a choir the music does not wait at the end of a line. Using photocopied pages, we then cut out the systems (staves linked vertically such as treble, tenor and bass, and the length of the page width) and glued them into a strip: this is, after all, what one sings. To make the strip easy to handle, a length of blank paper was glued to the end and then attached to a cardboard cylinder, paper roll inserts are suitable for this (as such, reinventing the scroll)!

The cylinder is held on a dowel and moved under the reader’s lamp, the singer reading and singing from the screen having set the desired magnification and controlling the speed of the strip under the lamp.

The method has proved a great success and we now have over 300 pieces of music scrolled and in use at our weekly practices.

Audio Books

After many years of peering through magnifying devices of progressively increasing strength, seeing less and less of the printed word, it was with some sadness that I found myself reading even large print virtually letter by letter on a CCTV electronic magnifier.

Although, with diligence and patience, it was do-able, I was found lacking in both. For me, at that time, accessing the printed word was just too exhausting, so I decided that I had come to the end of the road. Although I carried on using my electronic magnifier to read personal correspondence, cooking instructions or bills and the like, I had put my “reading for pleasure” days behind me.

Or so I thought, until a very kind lady told me about audio-books that you listen to. I really did miss my reading, so I signed up, selected about 50 titles from the catalogue and, within days, was listening to titles as varied as Dickens and Jane Austin; to a hilarious Spike Milligan war time romp and tome on Philosophy, Art and Religion; something that was very handy for bedtime as it put me to sleep quicker than Horlicks laced with valium! Whilst audio books are not everybody’s “Cup of Tea”, they do present a real solution to the problem of accessing print for many people, allowing access to a whole world of literature, information and entertainment.

Audio cassette tapes are still a very popular medium for the books, but they are now more commonly found on CD; while another popular format is the DAISY system, which is a little more sophisticated. You can even download your books from the Internet. If you would like to know more about audio books, call David at OAB on 01865 725595.