Teleprompter Font Size, Contrast and Readability: The Settings That Decide Whether You Look Like You Are Reading

Most people who look like they are reading on camera are not reading badly. They are reading text that is too small, too wide or too far from the lens, so their eyes have to travel to follow it, and the travel is what the viewer sees. The fix is rarely more practice. It is three or four settings that take a minute to get right and then stay right for every video after that.

This post is a settings walkthrough for Teleprompter: Camera Overlay, the free iPhone app that floats your script over the camera preview next to the front lens. The principles apply to any prompter, but the specific controls, text size, mirror mode and the two scroll modes, are the ones in the app. If you have not sorted out your framing yet, read the talking-head setup guide first; readability settings only work once the phone is where it should be.

The goal: read without moving your eyes

The whole problem of teleprompter readability comes down to one geometric fact. Your eyes can take in roughly a few words at a glance without moving, and the viewer cannot see a glance. What the viewer can see is a saccade, the small jump the eyes make to the next chunk of text, and especially the big jump back to the start of the next line. The more of those jumps per sentence, the more obviously you are reading.

So every setting below serves the same purpose: make each line short enough to take in with one look, make the text big enough that the look is effortless, keep the text as close to the lens as the layout allows, and keep the line you are reading in the same spot on the screen so your eyes never have to hunt for it. Do that and the remaining eye movement is small enough to disappear at normal viewing size.

Text size: bigger than feels natural

Almost everyone sets the text too small, because the phone is in their hand when they set it up and the text looks enormous at arm's length. Then they put the phone on a tripod a metre away and squint. The rule is to set the size from the recording position, not from the setup position. Put the phone where it will be, step back to where you will stand or sit, and adjust until you can read the current line comfortably without leaning in.

Text size is adjustable in both scroll modes, and for a phone at about a metre the useful setting is a lot larger than the one you would pick with the phone in your hand. At arm's length on a desk you can come down a few steps. Beyond about a metre and a half a phone screen is simply too small for comfortable reading at any size, which is one of the reasons the app records in portrait: it lets you keep the phone close and still frame yourself from the chest up. If you need more distance, for a full-body shot say, use larger text and shorter lines rather than fighting it, or move the script onto a bigger screen with a rig, which the mirror mode and DIY rigs post covers.

Line length: four to six words

Line length follows from text size, because bigger text means fewer words per line, and that is the point. Four to six words on a line is the sweet spot for a phone-width prompter: short enough to read in one or two glances, long enough that the scrolling does not feel frantic. Two-word lines make the script scroll like a slot machine; ten-word lines bring back the sideways eye travel you are trying to remove.

You get there with text size, not by typing line breaks, so the script wraps naturally at the width of the screen. The trick that helps most is to write the script in short sentences in the first place. A twenty-five-word sentence is three or four screen lines, and the long return journey at the end of each one is where eyes visibly jump. Our post on writing a script that does not sound written is really a readability post in disguise.

Overlay position: the lens, not the screen, is where you look

The app floats the script over the camera preview next to the front lens, which is the single biggest readability advantage a camera-overlay prompter has over a prompter that sits in a separate window or below the camera. The distance between the text you are reading and the lens is what sets the angle of your gaze, and that angle is what the viewer reads as eye contact or the lack of it. At a metre, a couple of centimetres of offset is invisible; a few more and you are visibly looking down.

What you control is the geometry around the phone: put the front lens at eye level, keep the phone in portrait so the lens sits at the top centre, and read the top of the scrolling text rather than the middle of the screen, since the top is closest to the lens. If the script covers your face in the preview, that is fine: the script never appears in the saved video, so what you see during the take is a guide, not the result. The eye contact post goes deeper on where to look.

Contrast and lighting: the setting you set with the lamp

The text sits over a live camera preview, so contrast is not a colour setting you pick in a menu, it is a question of what the camera is pointed at. A bright window behind you, a white wall, a pale shirt filling the middle of the frame: all of these put bright preview pixels behind the script and make it harder to read. The fix is to light yourself from the front rather than behind, and to frame so that the area behind the text is not the brightest thing in the shot. A darker, plainer background behind you reads better on camera anyway, so the two goals pull in the same direction.

Screen brightness matters more than people expect. Turn the phone's brightness up for the take and turn off auto-brightness, because a dimming screen mid-script is both hard to read and hard to notice while you are speaking. Outdoors in daylight, no prompter on a phone screen is comfortable; shoot in open shade and accept larger text and shorter takes.

Scroll settings: where the reading line sits

Readability is not only about the text you are on; it is about never having to look for it. In voice-follow mode the app scrolls to keep up with you, using on-device speech recognition, so the line you are speaking stays in the reading zone and you can pause, breathe or ad-lib without the text drifting away. In classic auto-scroll the speed slider is the setting to tune: too slow and your eyes drop lower and lower down the screen, further from the lens; too fast and you start racing it. Set it on a practice read of one paragraph, then leave it; a tap pauses the scroll and a drag jumps anywhere in the script if you do lose the line.

Either way the aim is for the line you are reading to sit in the same place on the screen for the whole take, as high and as close to the lens as the layout allows. The voice-follow versus auto-scroll post explains which mode suits which kind of video; for readability the difference is that voice-follow keeps the reading line stable automatically and auto-scroll asks you to pace yourself to keep it there.

Mirror mode: only with glass in the way

Mirror mode flips the text horizontally. It exists for beam-splitter rigs, where you read the script reflected in a piece of glass in front of the lens, and the reflection un-flips it. If you are reading straight off the phone screen, leave it off; mirrored text on a direct screen is unreadable, and it is the first thing to check if the script suddenly looks wrong. With a rig, mirror mode plus larger text is the standard combination, because the glass sits further from your eyes than the phone would.

A one-minute setup checklist

• Put the phone where it will record, then step back to where you will be.
• Raise text size until the current line reads without effort from there.
• Check the wrap: four to six words a line. If lines are longer, go bigger or shorten sentences.
• Front lens at eye level, phone in portrait, and read the top of the text, nearest the lens.
• Look at what is behind the text in the preview; light from the front and keep the brightest part of the frame out from behind the script.
• Brightness up, auto-brightness off.
• Do a ten-second practice read and watch where the reading line settles; adjust scroll speed or trust voice-follow.
• Mirror mode off unless there is glass between you and the screen.

When these settings will not save you

Readability settings fix a reading problem. They do not fix a script problem or a distance problem. If the script is dense with numbers, names and clauses, no font size will stop your eyes working hard; cut the script instead, and our post on reading long scripts without losing your place is the one to read. If the phone is two metres away for a wide shot, the honest answer is a bigger screen or a shorter script you can half-remember. And if your eyes are tired at the end of a long batch session, the small text that was fine at nine in the morning will not be fine at four; bump it a step before the last few takes rather than pushing through.

Get these right once and they become the defaults you never think about again. Next in this series: writing scripts for compliance-heavy topics, where medical, legal and financial wording has to be read exactly as approved and the prompter stops being a convenience and becomes the point.