

Ask HN: Responsive design for TVs? - wuliwong

I have a regular desktop computer attached to the flat screen TV in my living room. I have made some adjustments (mostly larger font sizes) to make the experience better but I have concluded that until some larger &quot;revolution&quot; takes place, it is going to be a sub-optimum experience.<p>There are some design standard type documents out there like https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.google.com&#x2F;tv&#x2F;web&#x2F;docs&#x2F;design_for_tv. Following these standards, I could certainly optimize my site for TV viewing but the question is how to &quot;turn it on?&quot; Responsive design &quot;responds&quot; to browser or OS type (in addition to screen size) but in my specific case, I am using a  desktop browser on a 1080p TV. I don&#x27;t see anything obvious to respond to.<p>How might you see this &quot;problem&quot; being solved? Could browsers start to support &quot;TV mode&quot; as a setting? That would be a nice option, I could just set once on this computer and never consider it again. Other devices like Apple TV could also have this setting in place and developers could just look for this and respond accordingly. But even if that happened, I&#x27;m sure it wouldn&#x27;t be for a long time.<p>What could we do now? Any UX&#x2F;UI people have ideas? Some sort of button on my site that says &quot;TV Mode&quot;?<p>This is something I think about quite often and I thought I&#x27;d ask you fine folks what you thought.<p>Thanks.
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acdha
PPK wrote about this awhile back in the context of Smart TVs as well:

[http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/tv/index.html](http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/tv/index.html)

The big thing missing is a way to query expected viewing distance so you could
distinguish between a 1080 laptop screen 14 inches from the user and a TV 10
feet away.

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wuliwong
Yes, that seems to be one of the open questions currently. I also wonder how
you deal with the fact that there are so many sizes and distances that TV's
are viewed from? That actually might not be very different than mobile or any
other situation. There are lots of phone screen sizes and desktop monitor
sizes and resolutions. I guess if you are comfortable watching TV then you are
most likely at a similar size/distance ratio to most people who are
comfortable.

