Text Smoothing

[TheMacintoshLady]

     Can anyone please tell me how to make the smeary text go away on X? 
On the regular Mac you can take that off of everything and have no wavy 
lines, but on X it's only ABOVE 12.
I am getting complaints that my text in IMs is too big, but anything 
smaller than 18 looks like when you first get a new Mac with OS 9 and 
don't turn off that text smoothing in the appearance panel.

I am going blind using OS X. There must be an addon to help with this!