Text is crucial on the World Wide Web. Text helps users navigate through sites and delivers sought-for information. The readability of your site's text when it's displayed on a television set is the single most important element in making your Web pages accessible to WebTV users. This article tells you how to make sure that your site's text is readable on a television screen.

A pair of distinctions are important to this discussion:

• HTML text vs. graphical text. HTML text is text that can be reflowed by a browser and is affected by HTML formatting commands such as bold, italics, and font size. The text that you're reading right now is HTML text, as is most text on the Web. Graphical text, on the other hand, is embedded in graphical elements such as clickable image maps. The text at the top of this page -- "Home," "Forum" etc. -- is graphical text.
  
  
• Navigation text vs. body text. Navigation text is usually single words or short phrases that let users know where to click to get to information. Navigation text includes most of the words in clickable image maps and link text as well. Body text is usually sentences and paragraphs that provide information, such as the text you're reading.

Most text on the Web is HTML text used in the body of a Web page. However, users devote a large amount of their attention to navigational text, which is often graphical, as in navigation bars. So making all the text on your Web site readable on WebTV as well as on personal computers is very important.

This article explains in detail how to make the text in your Web site readable on television, in three sections:

• How text works on WebTV
  
  
• A quick fix: Navigation bars on WebTV
  
  
• Making text work across platforms