User control of text
Silktide asks you to confirm that readers can adapt how blocks of text are presented - colours, line length, spacing, and size - to suit their own needs. This is a manual review, because these qualities depend on how your design behaves rather than anything a scan can measure directly.
Why this matters
Many people with low vision or reading difficulties such as dyslexia can only read comfortably with their own presentation settings: their own colour scheme, shorter lines, wider spacing, or larger text. A design that fights those adjustments - fixed colours, very wide text columns, cramped line spacing - locks these readers out. This is a goal (success criterion 1.4.8), beyond what most laws require but a strong marker of a genuinely readable site.
How to fix it
This check is a prompt to verify each of the following for blocks of text:
- Readers can select their own foreground and background colours - avoid that overrides user-chosen colours.
- Lines of text are no wider than 80 characters (40 for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean text).
- Text is not justified (stretched to align with both margins), which creates uneven word spacing that is hard to read.
- Line spacing is at least 1.5 within paragraphs, and paragraph spacing is at least 1.5 times the line spacing.
- Text can be resized up to 200% without , and without forcing horizontal scrolling to read each line.
Once you have verified the page (or accepted the trade-offs), the finding.
How Silktide tests this
- Every page is flagged for manual review. Silktide cannot automatically judge whether your design satisfies all five presentation requirements, which depend on user preferences and browser behaviour.