RE: Size of a clickable area and the WCAG 2 guidelines

Jonathan,

Have a look at 1.4.4 (Resize text) and 1.4.5 (Images of text) as the most prominent guidelines of making (clickable) content accessible. Basically, ensure that the sizes of elements on your page are defined in *relative sizes* (percent, named or em) and let the user chose their magnification level.
Often designers (me included) are tempted to fix the size of buttons, images etc. in order to not break our layout (really bad) but a little common sense helps to start with a well sized item.

Other techniques like adding labels to form elements help as well. The complete label becomes clickable and will for example select the radio button/checkbox or set the focus to the related form element.

The only real value I see in Fitt's law is that it tells me that related elements (list of links, etc.) should be grouped together and that commonly used elements (menu, zoom slider on maps, etc.) should be bigger than usual because they will be used more often by travelling further distances with the mouse.

Hope that helps.
Michael Gaigg

From: w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Jonathan Avila
Sent: Tuesday, February 23, 2010 5:29 PM
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: Size of a clickable area and the WCAG 2 guidelines

Perhaps I missed something but I cannot locate anything in WCAG 2 requiring a minimum clickable area for clickable items such as links or a minimum amount of space between clickable items.  These accessibility best practices seem like more than usability requirements for people with mobility impairments and surely should at least be level AAA guidelines.  Can anyone point me to a mapping into WCAG 2 for these?

Jonathan