A Touch Target Audit Finds the Small Buttons and Real Misses

What We Keep Finding

Tiny targets fail people constantly and silently. The 16-pixel close button. The paginator dots. The icon row where every miss fires the neighbor. WCAG 2.2 put a floor under this at Level AA, 24 by 24 CSS pixels, meaning a 24 by 24 square has to fit inside the target. A stricter 44 by 44 rule has existed since 2.1, but it sits at Level AAA, which is why almost nobody was ever asked to meet it.

The part that saves clients money is the second way of passing, and it gets described wrongly nearly everywhere including in our own material. Spacing is not a carve-out for a handful of odd cases. It is an alternative test available to every undersized target. Centre a 24-pixel circle on each small target, and if those circles do not touch another target or another small target's own circle, the target passes at whatever size it is. Which means an undersized button standing on its own with nothing near it passes on spacing alone. Read the criterion as "24 by 24, or spaced" and most of the panic goes away.

Three more exceptions matter and two of them come up daily. A target in a sentence, sized by the line it sits in, is out of scope, which is what stops every link in a paragraph becoming a finding. So is an undersized control where the same job can be done by another control on the same page that does meet the size. And anything the browser draws and you never touched is outside the rule entirely, which decides whether a native select's option rows are a finding.

The gesture rule is narrower than teams assume, and the assumption costs real money. It catches gestures needing more than one finger, or gestures where the path you trace matters. What it asks for is an alternative that works with a single pointer and without tracing a path, which rules out offering a swipe as the alternative, since a swipe is itself path-based. A tap, a click or a long press is the shape of a conforming answer. So a carousel you swipe needs a pair of buttons beside it, and a carousel needing two fingers or a traced shape needs the same thing.

The cancellation rule is a menu of four, not a rule of one. Firing on the press instead of the release is fine if there is an undo, or if releasing somewhere else aborts it, or if the down-event is essential to the thing. It is only a failure when none of the four is true, so the honest test is which of the four you have got rather than whether you fire on release.