How Text Works on WebTV

Making text readable on a television set is an important goal of WebTV. Each WebTV system includes special circuitry to make text more easily readable on a TV screen and to reduce flickering. The WebTV system also adjusts text to make it more readable by:

  • "Upsizing" HTML text. WebTV displays HTML text in a font roughly equivalent to 18-point Helvetica. This helps keep the text readable despite the flickering and fuzziness inherent to a TV screen, though it also means much less text fits onscreen.

  • Re-flowing HTML text. Like other Web browsers, WebTV re-flows HTML text to fit in the overall window and in the column assigned to it. On WebTV, fixed line breaks can make text hard to read. Since the text is displayed in a large font, text in narrow columns will look bad, with only one or two words per line.

Figure 1 shows HTML text displayed in the WebTV Viewer, which upsizes and re-flows text just like WebTV. The WebTV service allows the user to choose three sizes of text:

  • Large. Large text, like the text shown in the figure, is for people who want maximum text readability, such as people with poor eyesight or those with a small or fuzzy television set. In the figure, about 185 words are displayed onscreen.

  • Medium. This is the default setting. It allows about 25% more text to be displayed than the large setting.

  • Small. The small text setting allows about 50% more text to fit onscreen than the large setting.

Once text has been "upsized," it becomes much easier to read on a TV screen. The WebTV Viewer can't fully simulate the readability of text on a WebTV system because it is run on a personal computer with a computer monitor, not a TV set. You have to test on an actual WebTV system to test for legibility and see how your Web pages will look when viewed by WebTV users.

Figure 1. HTML text displayed in the WebTV Viewer.

You can use font size options to control the size of text on a WebTV system. Examples of all text sizes are shown in Figure 2. Note that the font sizes on WebTV are much larger than the corresponding font sizes on a personal computer system.

Figure 2. Font sizes on a WebTV-like screen.

Next section: A quick fix: Navigation bars on WebTV

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