When touch target size is worth the effort

The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. Touch target size is not free, and pretending otherwise leads to bad decisions.

Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

When it is worth it

Small targets cause mis-taps and frustration. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

When it is not

If nothing downstream depends on it and nobody is complaining, it can wait. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped.

How to decide

Spacing between targets matters as much as size. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

What this looks like day to day

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
• 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

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.