What to ask your agency about touch target size

Every audit we run turns up some version of this. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on touch target size, these questions are worth asking early.

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.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Small targets cause mis-taps and frustration. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

Spacing between targets matters as much as size. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

In practice

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
• Spacing between targets matters as much as size — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.