Is Your Page WebTV Friendly?

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Is Your Page
WebTV Friendly?

A WebTV grandmother explains
by Willie Wass, Hot Springs, Arkansas

"Number, please."

For thirty years that is how I answered the telephone, on the switchboard at the telephone company here in Hot Springs, and I still catch myself saying it. These days I do my connecting from a recliner.

My son Russell gave me a WebTV Plus for Christmas of 1997. He hooked it to the television in the den, plugged it into the phone jack, and showed me how to work the keyboard, which has no cord on it, and the remote control, which I already knew how to work, thank you very much. I have been on the Internet nearly every day since. My husband Carroll, who passed in 1991, would not believe a word of it.

I am 78 years old. My eyes are fine for 78, which is to say they are not fine. I have read more home pages on that television than I could count, and a good many of them were made by people who never once thought about anybody looking at them on a TV set. There are a lot of us out here: grandmothers mostly, some granddaddies, and folks who couldn't afford a computer or didn't want one taking over the dining room table. This page is for the young people who make home pages, so you'll know how yours looks from my chair.

How the Web Looks from My Recliner

A WebTV is a little box that sits on top of your television and talks to the Internet over the telephone line. There's no mouse. You hop from one link to the next with the arrow keys, a yellow box shows you which one you're on, and one push of a button takes you there. You read a page by scrolling it up the screen a piece at a time.

The whole picture is only about 544 dots wide. That's a good bit narrower than the computer screens most of you build your pages on. And a television isn't near as sharp as a computer screen. It was made to show Wheel of Fortune from across the room, not little bitty print from three feet away.

Six Things I Wish Every Webmaster Knew

1. Keep it narrow.

My screen is about 544 dots wide. If you build your page in a table 760 dots wide, WebTV has two choices and neither one is any good. It squeezes your table down till the words are stacked up like cordwood, one or two to a line, or it lets the page run off the side and I have to scroll over to read the end of every line, and back, and over, and back. I don't stay on those pages long. Give your table a percent instead of a number, and it will fit whatever it's on:

Same goes for pictures. A photo 800 dots wide is too big for my television and too big for most of your visitors, too.

2. Big type.

Small type turns to mush on a television. SIZE="1" is a smear on my set and SIZE="2" is a squint. Leave your words at the regular size or make them bigger. This page is all in sizes 4 and 5, and I don't believe it hurts a thing on a computer. My church friends who use computers tell me they like it.

3. Go easy on bright red and pure white.

A television does not care for bright red. It bleeds. Red letters look like they're melting at the edges, and a big red stripe across the top of a page seems to crawl. Pure white is no better: a white background glares like the sun on a snowfield, and after ten minutes I have to look at the wall to rest my eyes. Bright red on white is the worst there is.

Use a soft cream or a light gray for your background and a dark color for your words. This page is cream with navy blue. You'll notice there isn't a lick of red on it.

4. Frames are a trial.

WebTV does its best with frames, I'll give it that. But cut a 544-dot screen into three pieces and every piece is a mail slot. I spend half my visit hopping the yellow box from one frame to another trying to find the part that scrolls. If you use frames, please put a link on your front page to a version without them. I will take it every time.

5. Java won't run.

WebTV does not run Java. Those scrolling signs, the little Java games, the fancy menus: I don't see any of it. Where your Java is supposed to be, I get an empty spot, and if your only way to the rest of your site is a Java menu, I can't get to the rest of your site. Always put plain links somewhere on the page too.

This is also why I can't use Page Builder, which needs Java, and why I can't go to the GeoCities.us chats. I'd have liked the Heartland Kitchen chat on Wednesday nights. Maybe someday.

6. Write your ALT text.

Pictures come down the telephone line to me the same as they do to you, and some come slow and some don't come at all. When one doesn't come, the words you put in ALT are all I get. "Grandpa and the big catfish, 1998" tells me a story. No ALT tells me nothing.

A lady in my Sunday school class who is losing her sight has a computer that reads pages out loud to her. It reads her the ALT, too. So you're doing it for her as well as for me.

And one more, free of charge: WebTV plays your background music right through the television speakers, at whatever loudness I last had the news on. If you must have a song, please don't make it start by itself. I have been run clean out of my chair.

How I Made This Page

I didn't use Page Builder, for the reason I already told you. I made this page the way you'd write a letter. I typed it.

GeoCities.us has what they call the Basic HTML Editor. It's a big box right there in the Web browser, and whatever you type in it is your page. My granddaughter Danielle printed me out a list of tags from a book at the school library, and I sat in this chair with the list on my lap and typed every tag on this page into that box with my wireless keyboard. It took me three evenings and two pots of coffee. The editor box looks small on a television and I had to scroll around inside it like a mole in a garden, but I got it done.

If a 78-year-old woman can type a home page into a television set, you can take five minutes and make yours fit on one.

What I've Found So Far

I have looked at 63 pages for people who wrote and asked me to. Most had more than one trouble, so these don't add up to 63, and they aren't supposed to. Here is what I found:

Trouble	Pages
Pictures without ALT	41
Too wide for the screen	36
Type too small	27
Glaring white or bleeding red	19
Music that started by itself	14
Java I couldn't see	10
Frames	8
Nothing wrong at all	5

Those five, I wrote back and told them so, and I meant it. One of them was a young man in Ohio with a page about his model trains, and it looked so nice on my television I sent the address to my brother.

My Offer

Send me the address of your page, and I will look at it on my television from this recliner, the way your WebTV visitors will see it, and write you back and tell you what I saw. Plain, and kind, but plain. It doesn't cost a thing. I'm retired. I have the time and I have the opinions.

Tell me what your page is about and whether there's any part you're worried over. Give me about a week. Tuesday is bridge and Wednesday is choir, and some weeks the mail stacks up.

Write to me at [email protected]

I'll connect you.

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Last updated September 21, 1999
Made on a WebTV Plus, in a recliner, in Hot Springs.
Best viewed from across the room.