Conference in Cloud and online meeting technology

[Geoffrey Broadwell]

On 2020-05-26 06:43, Walt Mankowski via yapc wrote:
> On Tue, May 26, 2020 at 07:57:50AM -0400, James E Keenan via yapc 
> wrote:
> 
>> Also, slide layout and typography:  What have people found works best 
>> over
>> Zoom?  My impression so far is that I can get away with my normal 
>> fonts in
>> my slides -- but that if I go share my terminal, the font, font size 
>> and
>> background color need to be chosen more carefully than usual.
> 
> I haven't presented over Zoom yet but I've watched a bunch of
> presentations. I think you can get away with smaller fonts than you'd
> use at an in-person meeting. A mistake many people make is that they
> assume that since the fonts look fine to them when they're sitting in
> front of a monitor, they'll also look find to someone sitting in the
> 10th row. But for an online presentation pretty everyone in your
> audience will also be sitting in front of a monitor.
> 
> You should probably avoid really tiny fonts and low-contrast colors,
> but the margin of error is much greater.

Not necessarily true (that the margin of error is greater), for a 
somewhat
non-obvious reason:

Fonts are not usually designed to look good at regular sizes after heavy 
lossy
compression (which is often used in VC software even for presenting 
computer
screens). Sometimes font sizes that are quite readable directly on a 
display,
or when passed through lossless or low-loss compression such as PNG or
high-quality JPEG, are darned near unreadable on VC -- especially if the 
VC
software decides to send the presentation stream significantly 
downsampled
from the native screen resolution (or worse, one of the viewers is on a 
poor
connection and gets further downsampled even from the main stream in 
which
case your local picture-in-picture of your outgoing stream will not 
represent
the mess that they are receiving).

Thus I often find it necessary to expand font sizes for everyday VC as 
much or
more than I would use when presenting in a decent-sized physical meeting 
room.
(Though admittedly not as much as I would use to present to a large 
auditorium.)

Also, the advice to avoid low contrast definitely holds.  VC compression 
often
trashes color as well, especially very dark, light, or muted colors, and 
things
that are hard to see on a low-quality physical projector (washing out, 
or making
color-blindness perception issues even worse) can be just as bad on VC.