False positive failure for SEO tap targets & legible font size due to lack of viewport meta tag

[alystair]

FAQ

• [X] Yes, my issue is not about variability or throttling.
• [X] Yes, my issue is not about a specific accessibility audit (file with axe-core instead).

URL

https://evilumbrella.com/

What happened?

Site results show the following issues:

MOBILE FRIENDLY

• Does not have a tag with width or initial-scaleNo <meta name="viewport"> tag found
• Document doesn't use legible font sizesText is illegible because there's no viewport meta tag optimized for mobile screens.
• Tap targets are not sized appropriatelyTap targets are too small because there's no viewport meta tag optimized for mobile screens

What did you expect?

Expected warning of not having a <meta> tag, but the website doesn't exhibit the other two issues at all due to appropriate CSS.

What have you tried?

Putting in <meta name="viewport"> without any attributes (dumb, I know) seemed to remove those errors - perhaps verification is conditional on the meta element being present to begin with and auto fails them otherwise?

How were you running Lighthouse?

Chrome DevTools

Lighthouse Version

9.4.0

Chrome Version

101.0.4922.0 (Official Build) canary (64-bit) (cohort: Clang-64)

Node Version

No response

OS

Windows

Relevant log output

No response

[paulirish]

Very interesting case yah

I agree the tap target sizes look good. And the font sizes also look good. I suspect we do not want to accommodate this edge case, but it raises a question on how our implementation isn't satisfied.

Putting in without any attributes (dumb, I know) seemed to remove those errors

Also thanks for flagging. That's unexpected. I didn't verify this, but if true, it's a LH bug.