Touch target size: the questions we get asked most

The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. The questions about touch target size that come up most often on our calls.

Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

Do we need to care about this?

Small targets cause mis-taps and frustration. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

Can it wait until after launch?

Occasionally. More often the post-launch version costs several times the pre-launch one. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly.

How do we know it is working?

Spacing between targets matters as much as size. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

The short version

The cost of retrofitting accessibility is several times the cost of building it in. Three things worth confirming about touch target size before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Small targets cause mis-taps and frustration — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.