TouchEvent.touches

A TouchList listing all the Touch objects for touch points that are currently in contact with the touch surface, regardless of whether or not they've changed or what their target element was at touchstart time.

This property is Read only .

Could be thought of how many separate fingers are able to be identified to be touching the screen.

Syntax

var touches = touchEvent.touches;

Return value

touches

A TouchList listing all the Touch objects for touch points that are still in contact with the touch surface, regardless of whether or not they've changed or what their target element was at touchstart time.

Example

This example illustrates the TouchEvent object's TouchEvent.touches property. The TouchEvent.touches property is a TouchList object and containing a list of Touch objects for every point of contact currently touching the surface.

In following code snippet, the touchstart event handler checks the length of the TouchEvent.touches list to determine the number of touch points that were activated and then invokes different handlers depending on the number of touch points.

someElement.addEventListener('touchstart', function(e) {
   // Invoke the appropriate handler depending on the 
   // number of touch points.
   switch (e.touches.length) {
     case 1: handle_one_touch(e); break;
     case 2: handle_two_touches(e); break;
     case 3: handle_three_touches(e); break;
     default: console.log("Not supported"); break;
   }   
 }, false);

Specifications

Browser compatibility

[1] Touch events were implemented in Gecko 18.0, but removed again in 24.0 (Firefox 24.0 / Thunderbird 24.0 / SeaMonkey 2.21) on the desktop version of Firefox due to web compatibility issues (bug 888304).

[2] As of Gecko 52.0, touch events support has been fixed and reenabled in Windows desktop platforms.