Grid lines in background

[William King]

I'm using voice recognition software (Dragon naturally speaking) in 
emacs that allows me to specify a row and column to which I would like 
the cursor moved. This works very well.

However, while  it is visually easy specifying a line number, things are 
awkward when specifying the column number because I can't tell exactly 
which column I want to go to.  I want a way to make this easier. My 
preferred solution would be to have some kind of grid lines in the 
background of all windows, for example for the shading of the background 
to alternate every 10 columns, so that I can tell reasonably easily at a 
glance that a particular character is in column x.

I can't work out a way of doing this.  "column-number-mode" does not 
provide what I need.  I have looked at vline.el, but this seems only to 
highlight the column that the cursor is in.

I would really appreciate any advice about how I might approach this 
problem.

Many thanks.

Will King