Text Banner is quite easy to use. When you have it enabled, a banner will open up at the bottom of your screen. It will show you information about the currently highlighted item in large clearly visible, and high contrast text. You can also decide to show or hide the banner if you don’t need it by long-pressing the Play button on your remote. If you have more content than fits in the banner then press the Right or Left button on your remote.
After you have read the tutorial, press select to close the tutorial and navigate back to the home screen. You’ll see each item you select clearly displayed on the white text banner at the bottom of your screen. This new feature will be very useful if you have limited vision or vision impairment issues. You can clearly see the current item on your Firestick without wearing your glasses. This is if you do wear glasses to get a clear vision.
For example, some movies and shows have small print descriptions that are hard to read. But when you have the Text Banner feature enabled, you can clearly see the full description. This will include important statements such as the movie’s rating out of 5 stars, IMDb rating, and a brief description of what the movie is all about. If you have kids in the house, you’ll be able to tell if the movie or TV show they want to watch is suitable for their age.
The tutorial screen appears the first time you enable the new Text Banner. It explains the basic information on how to use the new feature. When the Text Banner feature is enabled, you can simply hold the Play button on your remote to toggle the banner on or off.
You can even toggle the text on the banner to fit the limits of the banner size. To do this, press the Fast Forward or Rewind button on your remote. If you want to use the Fast Forward, Rewind, or Play buttons in their regular use, you must make sure to hide the banner first by holding down the Play button.
One thing we noted is that the Text Banner feature doesn’t work in all apps. It, however, works throughout the entire Firestick interface. This includes Amazon’s apps such as Prime Video and other apps such as IMDb TV. Currently, it doesn’t give detailed information on apps such as Netflix and YouTube. This is probably because some of the 3rd party apps don’t provide all the necessary metadata for the text banner to display.
However, this new Text Banner feature is a great addition to other accessibility features recently added on Fire TV and Firestick in recent years. It makes it extremely easy for people with vision impairments to use their favorite streaming devices. It’s a great feature that goes to show how Amazon is investing their time and resources to create more accessibility advancements for people who really need them.