Touch target size, explained without the jargon

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. Here is touch target size without the vocabulary that usually surrounds it.

The cost of retrofitting accessibility is several times the cost of building it in. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

The short version

Small targets cause mis-taps and frustration. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

Why people complicate it

Most of the confusion comes from tooling rather than from the idea itself. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens.

Around 44px square is the usual minimum. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

A reasonable first step

Spacing between targets matters as much as size. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

How to tell if yours is fine

Most of it is correctness rather than charity: use the right element and much of it happens automatically. Three things worth confirming about touch target size before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Around 44px square is the usual minimum — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.