51–60 of 944 posts
You know what's an accessibility problem for a lot of people over 40? White text on a dark background. I don't think I'll ever get tired of hearing people advocate for making web pages readable for people my age. Yeah, opening up the inspector and updating the author's CSS made it readable for me, but made the shell script unreadable.
You know what's an accessibility problem for a lot of people over 40? White text on a dark background. I don't think I'll ever get tired of hearing people advocate for making web pages readable for people my age. Yeah, opening up the inspector and updating the author's CSS made it readable for me, but made the shell script unreadable.
It's to the point that if highlighting all the text doesn't mitigate the dark/white contrast, I'll just avoid reading that page entirely.
I don’t think this is UX/UI designers not knowing/caring about accessibility. It’s their bosses saying the tiny scrollbar is preferred because it sells 20% more due to the aesthetics being better. Who cares about the 0.5% of disabled people that weren’t likely to buy your app anyway. Same for browsers, FF may care about accessibility, but they won’t lose the browser wars (bit of a moot point by now, but eh) because m…
I think we need to stop shifting blame to "the bosses." The bosses are (generally) not getting involved with the minutia of how scroll bars work or what color they are, or how accessible they are. This problem falls squarely in the lap of 1. the UX designers who think scrollbars are icky and get in the way of their pure vision of the app and 2. the developers who don't push back on the madness.
Yes, I've had "bosses" who annoyingly micromanaged the UX of our product, and yes, it's irritating when that happens. But I highly doubt it's the general case. Designers have run amok in the never-ending quest to fill out their portfolios, and accessible things like thick scrollbars, large fonts, contrasting bold colors, and an information architecture that lends itself to screen readers get in the way of their sterile, minimalist aesthetic.
I run into so many websites that I think are completely broken because they have a scollable popover or some other weird element, but it's impossible to tell that there is content because the scroll bar is hidden on this small interior frame. Absolutely infuriating. I blame iOS and macOS for encouraging this insanity and starting the fashion trend, and tangentially whoever pushed along this whole "flat" UI trend that…
In the context of the original iPhone at least, hiding the scrollbar when not scrolling makes some amount of sense… when your screen is 3.5" in size and your goal is to render content with "desktop" fidelity, there's not a whole lot of room for a scrollbar, plus most people aren't going to be interacting with the scrollbar. For desktop OSes where the smallest screen being used is much larger on the other hand there's…
It looks nicer + you can just use the scroll wheel. A lot of the UI affordances lost over the last decade or two are unfortunate, but complaints about scroll bars seem to be purely baby duck syndrome.
I have come to a funny realisation recently. It's not my eyesight which is becoming worse, it's the UIs which are becoming worse. The tiny scrollbars with laughable contrast are in no way accessible to anyone. I've recently switched to using KDE with the Oxygen theme and it's a joy to use without any eye strain. These scrollbars are absolutely pathetic, with no room for customisation. (good luck theming a locked-down…
I seem to recall that something like QtCurve offered buttons to do that within the scrollbar.
If only everyone did that, many time wasted in scrolling would be saved and "go to the top" buttons in websites wouldn't exist
I have come to a funny realisation recently. It's not my eyesight which is becoming worse, it's the UIs which are becoming worse. The tiny scrollbars with laughable contrast are in no way accessible to anyone. I've recently switched to using KDE with the Oxygen theme and it's a joy to use without any eye strain. These scrollbars are absolutely pathetic, with no room for customisation. (good luck theming a locked-down…
> Also, we wouldn't need "dark mode" or the such if the UIs had any contrast and were legible. Contrast is a factor yes, but the other thing that's happened with the flat UI epidemic is banishment of mid grays and light grays in favor of stark white and off-whites, making "light mode" much more bright looking than it had been previously. It's no wonder people were clamoring for dark mode after blinding flat UI had ta…
It wouldn’t matter if they did. I’ve been a web developer for nearly 25 years and have worked with many many designers. You know they care about? Pixel perfect layouts that match their “vision”. UX isn’t even a fleeting thought.
A scrollbar is not only a control, it's also an indicator. It shows where your viewport is relative to the bigger view, e.g. a long list. Hiding scrollbars, like some [redacted] GUIs like macOS do, is just acutely impolite, much like making buttons indistinguishable from text, or putting light grey text on a light grey background.
A solution exists, and is nearly universally implemented: scroll wheels on a mouse, and scroll gestures on a trackpad. Very, very rarely do I find a view which can be scrolled by scrollbars, but cannot be scrolled by the standard trackpad gesture, or by a mouse wheel. (BTW my mouse also allows horizontal scrolling using the wheel; so do trackpoint controls, too.)
Such scrolling does not require the pointer to even be at a scrollbar; the pointer just need to hover over the desired view / control / widget. This is really easy to achieve with imprecise input devices, unsteady hands, and poor vision.
But with this natural, easy way of scrolling one starts to really miss scrollbars in their indicator role.
(Regarding minimaps: sometimes they are helpful, sometimes not so much. I in particular find them unhelpful and bulky for text editing, but of course I'm all in favor of having them as an option for those who enjoy them.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the context of the original iPhone at least, hiding the scrollbar when not scrolling makes some amount of sense… when your screen is 3.5" in size and your goal is to render content with "desktop" fidelity, there's not a whole lot of room for a scrollbar, plus most people aren't going to be interacting with the scrollbar. For desktop OSes where the smallest screen being used is much larger on the other hand there's…
> there's not much of a good reason to hide them. It looks nicer + you can just use the scroll wheel. A lot of the UI affordances lost over the last decade or two are unfortunate, but complaints about scroll bars seem to be purely baby duck syndrome.