A steeply tiered hall generally allows a lower mounting height than a flat room of similar capacity, since raised rows naturally improve sightlines, though width still needs to account for the hall’s full seating spread.

Even within a tiered hall, the very back row still needs checking specifically, since elevation helps but doesn’t eliminate the effect of sheer distance on legibility.

A specific example: a 15-degree rake typically improves effective sightlines enough to allow a mounting height roughly 30 to 40 centimetres lower than an equivalent flat room, without any loss of legibility for back-row seats.

A flat, wide room without tiered seating needs a higher mounting position and often a wider board than a tiered hall of similar capacity, since sightlines aren’t assisted by elevation.

A long, narrow room places more emphasis on board height and text size than width, since the furthest seats are defined by distance down the room rather than lateral spread.

A concrete example: a hall measuring 8 metres wide but 25 metres long needs a board sized primarily around that 25-metre depth, since the width alone would suggest a much smaller board than the room’s actual furthest viewing distance requires.

A wide, shallow room needs to account for lateral viewing angle at the sides more than distance, since some seats may be close to the board but at a poor angle rather than simply far away.

A room that hosts different seating configurations for different events needs a more conservative specification that performs reasonably well across multiple layouts, rather than being optimised purely for one configuration.

Where possible, testing the specification against the room’s most demanding configuration, rather than its easiest one, gives a more reliable result across all the ways the room actually gets used.

See how Chameleon large classroom whiteboards can be specified to match the sightline demands of a wide range of learning space layouts.