How to vertically align text with icon font?

I have a very basic HTML which mix plain text and icon fonts. The problem is that icons are not exactly rendered at the same height than the text:

<div class="ui menu">
  <a href="t" class="item"><i class="large home basic icon"></i><span class="nav-text"> Accueil</span></a>
  <a href="" class="item"><i class="large camera retro icon"></i><span class="nav-text"> Créations</span></a>
  <a class="item"><span class="nav-text">Qui-suis je </span><i class="large help basic icon"></i></a>
</div>

Any suggestion to fix it?

In this scenario, since you are working with inline-level elements, you could add vertical-align: middle to the span elements for vertical centering:

.nav-text {
  vertical-align: middle;
}

Alternatively, you could set the display of the parent element to flex and set align-items to center for vertical centering:

.menu {
  display: flex;
  align-items: center;
}

There are already a few answers here but I found flexbox to be the cleanest and least "hacky" solution:

parent-element {
  display: flex;
  align-items: center;
}

To support Safari < 8, Firefox < 21 and Internet Explorer < 10 (Use this polyfill to support IE8+9) you'll need vendor prefixes:

parent-element {
  display: -webkit-box;
  display: -ms-flexbox;
  display: flex;
  -webkit-box-align: center;
      -ms-flex-align: center;
          align-items: center;
}

vertical-align can take a unit value so you can resort to that when needed:

{
  display:inline-block;
  vertical-align: 5px;
}

{
  display:inline-block;
  vertical-align: -5px;
}

Add this to your CSS:

.menu i.large.icon,
.menu i.large.basic.icon {
    vertical-align:baseline;
}

DEMO