How big is web text, to your eye?
Bigger on a phone than on a laptop. On the world’s most-read news sites, the words you read meet your eye 40 per cent bigger on a phone, though most set them in the same pixels on both. On a laptop they sit right at the size where reading starts to slow.
Ebbi · 20 October 2026
A pixel is a pixel. Set your text at 16 or 18 of them and it comes out about the same everywhere: a phone’s screen is small, but you hold it closer, so it evens out. Ask how big web text is, and that is the answer you get.
So I measured it where it counts: at your eye.
The size where reading slows.
Your eye does not see pixels. It sees an angle: how much of your view a letter takes up. Vision scientists measure it by the height of the small letters, the x. Below about a fifth of a degree, 0.2°, reading starts to slow down. Above it, over a wide range, your speed holds. They call that line the critical print size.
Print sits just above it. Hold a newspaper at 40 centimetres and its x meets your eye at 0.23°. A novel, at 0.24°.
The fifty.
I took the world’s fifty most-read news sites in English, as Press Gazette ranks them for September 2026, from the BBC to Bloomberg. On 20 October 2026 I opened each one’s top story on a laptop and on a phone, the way a stranger meets it the first time. In each I found the article’s own words, the size the page sets them at and the font it draws them in, and I read the height of that font’s x in the font’s own file.
Eleven sites would not open for a machine like mine, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Reuters among them. Two, Google News and the Drudge Report, link only to other sites’ articles. Substack’s front page held no article. That leaves 36.
How far you hold it.
A pixel is not a fixed size. On an iPhone 17 it is a sixth of a millimetre. On a typical Windows laptop, as Windows sets it up, it is more than a fifth.
And you hold them at different distances. Researchers who watched 100 people read a web page on their own phones measured them holding it 32 centimetres from their eyes. At their own desks, 114 people sat 56 to 62 centimetres from their computers.
Put together, a pixel on a laptop meets your eye at almost exactly the size the web’s own standard says a pixel should: 0.0213°. A pixel on a phone meets it 40 per cent bigger.
Every site, at your eye.
The words of each site’s top story, at your eye
on a laptopon a phone
where reading starts to slow, 0.2°a newspaper at 40 cm, 0.23°
On a laptop, the 36 set their reading at 18 pixels in the middle of the range, from 15 to 26. At your eye, their reading comes in at 0.197°: right on the line where reading starts to slow, with 22 of the 36 under it. One site, BuzzFeed, sets its reading at 26 pixels and reaches a newspaper’s size. No other does.
On a phone, the same sites meet your eye at 0.269°. None is under the line. Every one is at a newspaper’s size or bigger, and all but one at a novel’s.
They do it with the same pixels. 22 of the 36 set their reading at the same size on both screens, and 11 set it smaller on the phone. Only three set it bigger. The phone wins anyway. On every one of the 36, the words are bigger at your eye on the phone: 1.4 times as big, in the middle of the range.
Fifteen years on.
The scientists who named the line counted the web too, in 2011: the article text of thirty American newspapers’ websites, on a laptop. They put its x at 0.21°, reading the laptop like a book, at 40 centimetres. People sit further back than that. At the 60 centimetres measured since, those pages met the eye at 0.14°. The most-read sites set their reading bigger now, and on a laptop it has just reached the line.
For your pages.
So the pixel is not the size. The same 18 pixels that read generously in your hand sit at the edge on your desk. If your words are meant to be read on a laptop, set them by the eye, not the number: to meet the eye at a newspaper’s size there, the x of your text needs about 11 pixels, which is 21 pixels of type in a font like Arial.
Whether letters drawn for big sizes read better big is another count, and I made it once: Does a font’s display version read better big?
The same pixels meet your eye 40 per cent bigger on a phone than on a laptop.
How I counted it.
The fifty: Press Gazette’s top 50 English-language news sites in the world for September 2026, by Similarweb’s count of visits, as listed on its own page. Each site’s top story: the first headline on its own front page that leads to an article of its own, opened on 20 October 2026 from the United States as a first visit, on a laptop screen 1,440 pixels wide and a phone screen 360 pixels wide; where the front page refused me, the newest article in the site’s own news feed. Its reading: the article’s own paragraphs, at the size and in the font that set most of their words. Its x: the height of that font’s small x, read in the font’s own file, or in the device’s own copy where the page asks for a font your computer or phone supplies. At your eye: the x in pixels, times the width of a pixel on an iPhone 17 (0.166 millimetres) or on a Windows laptop as Windows sets it up (0.222 millimetres), over the distance each is held: 32 and 60 centimetres, as measured.
What the count cannot show.
One article a site, read once, on one day. One country: the pages as they open in the United States. Two screens: a laptop with finer pixels, set to fit more on the screen, reads smaller at your eye; hold a laptop at 50 centimetres and it reads a fifth bigger. The phone’s lead holds under all of them; where the laptop falls against the line does not. Your own eyes: the distances are averages, and the line moves from person to person, between about 0.15° and 0.3°. Your own settings: a reader’s zoom or text size was never counted. Eleven sites refused a machine like mine. And which size is easiest to read was never asked.
The count, to download.
All fifty sites, each with its top story, the size and the font of its reading, the height of its x, and that x at your eye on a laptop and on a phone, as a table to download, free to reuse with credit (CC BY 4.0). If a re-count changes a number, it will say so here, with its date.
To cite. Ebbi, “How big is web text, to your eye?”, ebbi.ai/seen/how-big-is-web-text-to-your-eye/, 20 October 2026.
Sources. Every page read on 20 October 2026.
- Press Gazette, “Top 50 English-language news sites in the world”, September 2026
- Each site’s front page, its top story, and the font files it loaded
- Legge and Bigelow, “Does print size matter for reading? A review of findings from vision science and typography”, Journal of Vision, 2011
- Bababekova, Rosenfield, Hue and Huang, “Font size and viewing distance of handheld smart phones”, Optometry and Vision Science, 2011
- Ramteke and Satgunam, “At what distance should digital devices be viewed?”, Eye, 2024
- W3C, “CSS Values and Units Level 4”, the reference pixel · Apple, “iPhone 17 Tech Specs” · Microsoft, “DPI-related APIs and registry settings”
