TromboneChat

Hello Fellow Trombonists,
I'm curious if anyone has experience trying to help a visually impaired trombonist read sheet music. My former teacher is getting up there (in his 80s) and can't read sheet music anymore. It's both too small and too white? He has expressed to me that he sees notes better when the contrast is reversed (white notes and staff on a black background).

I've tried using forScore hooked up to a larger monitor with the Reflow feature. It's about as large as a staff can get imo, and using a page turning pedal seems to work alright, but the contrast is still an issue. I'd like to know if their are any alternative options that aren't IOS specific. Or if anyone has other ideas about how to invert the contrast on a pdf.

Assuming the chart to be inverted is in a PDF file on a Mac:

(1) Open the file in the Preview app, select File --> Export from the app menu, choose JPEG as the output format, and save the result as a new file on the Desktop.

(2) Open the JPEG file in Preview and select Tools --> Adjust Color from the app menu. In the histogram at the top of the Adjust Color dialog grab the slider under the right corner and slide it *almost* all the way to the left, grab the slider under the left corner and slide it all the way to the right, then grab the first slider again and drag it the rest of the way to the left.

(3) Select File --> Print from the app menu, click the PDF button at the bottom of the Print dialog, and in the save dialog that appears select a name and location at which to save the inverted image as a PDF file. To clean up delete the intermediate JPEG file you saved on the Desktop.

Alright going to give it a shot.

I just grabbed my tablet and pulled up tomorrow's anthem.

I use MobileSheets, the main competitor to Forscore.

I touched the display tab, it showed Night Mode as an option, and viola my screen was black with white notes. Literally less than 10 seconds, and I hadn't known it was even there.

I found it difficult to read, but maybe I would get used to it. I tried it on a couple pieces where the scan wasn't perfect and Night Mode seems to need a pretty good scan.

MobileSheets was developed for the Android, but I think it may have been ported to iPad now. There was a free version, fully functional but it would only store 8 songs, so you might be able to experiment.

Recommendations mad for creating slides for lectures used to say brown letters on a yellow background had the best contrast. Don't know if that is a possible, but might be worth a try.

Has he had cataract surgery ? I was having difficulty and the surgery suddenly changed all what I saw as parchment colored pages to nice bright white!

Inspired by the night mode option on Mobile Sheets, it led me to figure out how to use a similar feature on my Macbook Pro (Accessibility > Display > Invert Colors > Classic Mode that seems to do the same thing for notes in Forscore (white on black). For now, this is a decent solution. Might go to MobileSheets just because getting a larger Android tablet will probably be cheaper to get for him.

He hasn't had cataract surgery. I imagine that would probably fix a lot of issues, but I'm not sure if I'm really capable of helping him with that. I guess I should check out if he has Medicare access and sort of see what the options are there. I wonder if they would do the work on someone who is 84.