Ask a mobile team how big a tappable button has to be and you will usually hear 44, attributed to the accessibility standard at its common compliance level. Our own article said the same thing. It was wrong, and nobody had checked.
The Market You Are Excluding
The scale first. The World Health Organization: "An estimated 1.3 billion people experience significant disability. This represents 16% of the world's population, or 1 in 6 of us" (WHO). An app those users cannot operate is not a degraded experience for them. It is a closed door, and in Europe it is now a regulated one.
What the Standard Actually Says
The 44 figure is real, but it belongs to the strictest tier of the standard, where WCAG 2.1 asks for targets of "at least 44 by 44 CSS pixels" (W3C). The level most regulations reference was given its own, smaller requirement in WCAG 2.2: "at least 24 by 24 CSS pixels" (W3C). Android asks for more than either. Its guidance is to "make sure to set the minimum size to 48dp to correctly follow the Material Design accessibility guidelines" (Android).
So a team that built to 44 and called it compliant was right by accident and could not have said why.
A Test That Could Not Fail
The same article carried an automated check for button size. It compared a measurement in one unit with a threshold in another, so it would pass on exactly the small buttons it was written to catch. It was published that way for months. The replacement uses the platform's own checker, "the same underlying framework that powers Accessibility Scanner and accessibility checks in Espresso" (Android).
What to Ask Your Team
- Which standard and which level do we claim, and can someone show the clause?
- Are accessibility checks automated in every build? A manual audit describes one day.
- Has anyone proved our accessibility tests can fail? Ours could not.
- Who has used the product with a screen reader this quarter?
-Rocky
#Accessibility #Compliance #ProductQuality #EngineeringDreams #StrategiaX
Originally published on ANDROID-ARCHITECT, the Android engineering blog of Strategia-X, with the corrected table and the code.