Re: Target Size and Target Size (no exception) SC

Hi Gregg,

I’m not behind this one, but during the US night time I’ll pass on what I’ve picked up:

>  This appears to include links.  
> If not - then why is it important to have these large and not links.  If they can’t operate the links why is it important to operate these

It does included links, the exceptions are all for things which are very difficult to do, impact the design, or come from native-browser behaviours.

The scenarios we are talking about are related to people with limited mobility or tremors who struggle to tap specific (small) targets. There are mobile-platform guidelines aimed at people *without* disabilities which specify >44 of their device-agnostic units (equivalent to CSS px), so the aim was to bring this to the web.


> if it DOES include links then we are forcing authors to never have small links on the page - even at the very bottom.  Everything has to be big.    

So that every link can be hit. As mentioned above the exceptions are only there due to the difficultly, impact on design, or native-browser behaviours which is why there is triple-A one without the exceptions.


>  (check my math but does this mean that all links on a page have to be in something like 33 point font?   That can’t be right — too late at night but that is what the online calculator says 44px would be)

No, the size of the target can be independent of the text size, although it does impact spacing around links. With the exception for ‘in blocks of text’ the font size isn’t really an issue. There are techniques to increase the target-size without affecting the text-size, but they do hit issues with overlapping each other in wrapping blocks of text, thus the exception.

> Why does the author have to make these big for everyone — when users can easily (if the content meets other SC) just use the  CTRL+  (or equiv)  to make everything bigger so they can use it.    

If you have trouble tapping links, you have trouble with pinch-zoom, it doesn’t resolve the user-need.


> Why does “customizable” exception exclude magnification.   

To prevent confusion with that separate mechanism.

If it helps you visualise it, I did a side-by-side comparison of the Wikipedia EN homepage (a worst-case scenario for link density?) with red outlines around the links on the right hand version:
https://alastairc.ac/tmp/wikipedia-44px-target-test.png 
NB: That was from before the in-text-blocks exception, so included larger links in the text areas as well.

Cheers,

-Alastair

Received on Wednesday, 24 May 2017 08:15:49 UTC