Accessible New Years’ Resolutions — Touch Target Size
As previously promised, I am going to to a deep dive every month on implementing features associated with the new WCAG 2.1 AA guidelines. Last month’s discussion was on the deadline for implementing the new guidelines. This month’s deep dive is on touch target size.
Touch target size seems like an insignificant thing to implement. Make the activation area big enough that people with poor fine motor skills can activate the control with a minimal amount of difficulty. How hard can that be? Is that really worth an entire Medium article? Turns out it’s a lot more complicated than one would initially think.
W3C used Github for tracking all questions and comments pertaining to the WCAG 2.1 update. Looking at the comment stream in the WCAG 2.1 github repository, out of the 24 issues discussed, touch target size won second place for most number of comments.
Adding to the confusion surrounding the WCAG 2.5.5 guideline is the fact that it appears that minimum touch target size may have originally been proposed to be a AA guideline, and somewhere along the way, got moved into AAA.
Despite the fact that WCAG 2.5.5 ended up as an AAA requirement, I feel it is important to consider implementing minimum touch target size as a best practice. Small touch target sizes impact people with several…
