Small desktop text
Silktide measures the size of the text people see when your pages are viewed on a desktop screen, and reports text that is rendered smaller than 12 pixels. Text this small is difficult or impossible for many people to read.
Why this matters
Desktop screens sit further from the reader than a mobile phone, so small text is proportionally harder to read there. Text below 12 pixels excludes readers with low vision, strains older readers, and pushes everyone else to lean in or zoom. Major design guidelines converge on 12 to 14 pixels as the practical minimum for desktop body text.
Small text is rarely a deliberate choice - it usually creeps in through legal boilerplate, footers, and third-party embeds that nobody re-reads.
How to fix it
- Increase the font size in your to at least 12px, and preferably 16px for body text.
/* Problem: too small to read comfortably on desktop */
.footer-note { font-size: 10px; }
/* Fix: use a readable size, ideally in relative units */
.footer-note { font-size: 0.875rem; } /* 14px at default settings */
- Prefer relative units (
rem,em) over fixed pixels, so text also scales when users change their browser's default font size. - If the flagged text is genuinely fine at its size - for example, a decorative flourish - you can the finding.
How Silktide tests this
- Render each page at a desktop screen size.
- Measure the final computed size of each piece of visible text, after all CSS is applied.
- Ignore hidden text, text meant only for , and fragments shorter than 2 characters (such as icon glyphs).
- Report text rendered below 12 pixels.
If your website is configured to exclude third-party content, text inside known third-party plugins is not reported.
Troubleshooting
The text looks fine on my screen
High-resolution displays and individual zoom settings can make small text look acceptable on your machine while it remains too small at default settings. The check measures the CSS pixel size every visitor's browser defaults to.
What about mobile?
Text size on the mobile rendering of your pages is tested separately by small text, which uses a threshold suited to mobile screens.