A while back I reviewed the reading machine that my mom, who suffers from macular degeneration, now depends on. I gave it a thumbs up, but also noted that she was having some problems.

On my last visit I came up with a method that will help, if she can get the hang of it. The method is non-obvious, and isn’t documented anywhere I’ve been able to find, so I made a short movie to illustrate it.

The key insights are:

Use the left margin screw to set a left margin somewhere

It almost doesn’t matter where, you just need a guide for carriage returns.

Position the book and the tray

Getting this right makes a huge difference. My mom was constantly fiddling with the position of the book on the tray. This frustrated her, and seriously impaired her ability to read fluidly.

But if you position the tray correctly, and the book relative to the tray, then you can easily read the whole page without touching or moving the book at all. Here’s how:

Align the bottom left corner of the book with the bottom left corner of the screen.

This is counter-intuitive. The natural expectation is to start at the top of the page. And you do want to start reading there. But I found that establishing a bottom margin is a crucial first maneuver, and it involves three steps:

1 Push tray all the way forward and rightward

2. Place book on tray

3. Move book to align bottom left corner of page with bottom left corner of screen

With the tray still as far forward and as far right as it will go, you have defined both a left margin and a bottom margin for the page. Now read the whole page without touching the book again. Here’s how:

Find the top of the page.

To do that you pull the tray out (forward, towards yourself) until the top margin of the page lines up with the top of the screen.

Read as many lines vertically as the screen can display.

Use only a two-stroke left/right motion of the tray. The sequence is:

1. Slide tray left to reveal ends of lines

2. Slide tray right for carriage return

My mom had been advancing the tray (by pushing it in) once per line. This wastes effort and disrupts context. If the left margin screw is set, a carriage return always goes to the same place. So it was easy — at least for her — to make a visual connection from the end of the previous line to the beginning of the next one.

I realize this part may not work for everyone, and maybe not even for her as her vision worsens. Right now, at her magnification, her screen can display 8 or 10 lines. At higher magnification, when only a few are visible, there will be less context to help make that connection. Then it may become necessary to scroll vertically once per line. But the longer that can be avoided, the better.

Why was this necessary?

Shouldn’t multi-thousand-dollar gizmos like this come with training materials that help people figure this stuff out? Yes, but I’ve given up being shocked that they don’t.

If you’ve got a friend or relative in the same boat, let me know if this writeup — and/or the accompanying video — makes sense.

A note on making the movie

The video combines slides with a side-by-side animation of the tray and the screen. I wound up using PowerPoint, which conveniently handles the three ingredients: text, bitmap graphics, and vector graphics.

Rather than use PowerPoint’s animation features, though, I made a sequence of frames, nudging objects by small increments from frame to frame. This turned out to be a surprisingly easy and approachable technique.

Then I turned on a screen recorder — I used Camtasia, but it could have been any other — and stepped through the frames.