The real cost of ignoring touch target size
Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. Nobody bills you for neglecting touch target size. The cost shows up somewhere else.
The cost of retrofitting accessibility is several times the cost of building it in. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.
Where the cost lands
- Time spent on work that should not have been necessary
- Enquiries that quietly never arrive
- Small targets cause mis-taps and frustration
- Rework, once the problem is finally visible
Around 44px square is the usual minimum. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.
A reasonable first step
Spacing between targets matters as much as size. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.
How to tell if yours is fine
Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. 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
None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.