Comments on mice don't tap and tablet-users don't click: what word can I use for all audiences instead?
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mice don't tap and tablet-users don't click: what word can I use for all audiences instead?
I am documenting features on a web site. The audience is end users, who could be anywhere from seasoned Internet veterans to relatively new people who came for my site's content but aren't generally online for hours every day. People visit the web site on a variety of devices, from phones (mobile site, touch) to tablets (desktop site, touch) to traditional computers (desktop site, mouse), and we do not plan to make documentation variants per form factor. (The site itself is responsive and follows mobile and desktop conventions as applicable.)
The documentation style is imperative, not descriptive (for clarity and to follow widespread convention). Sometimes the documentation needs to tell the user to interact with a button or link. Before mobile, we would have said "click". People reading on mobile devices know to mentally translate "click" to "tap" when reading instructions, but it makes me wonder if they are, in the back of their minds, wondering whether mobile is an afterthought for us and what else might be wrong in our documentation, so if I can find a better term I'd like to.
I considered "select", but to experienced techies that means "highlight", not "invoke". I don't know how much I should be concerned about that when writing for a general audience. (Most of my previous work has been for very technical readers and must be precise.)
Is there a general-purpose, concise term that works in imperative voice for "invoke a thing in a UI"?
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