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Scrollbars are becoming a problem

artemis.sh

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Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#121

Post by tom_ »

bastawhiz wrote: post #106

I'm generally not a person to die on hills like this, but the disappearing scroll bars on macOS have really been a point of significant contention for me. Sometimes I just want to click and drag a scrollbar. And it seemingly takes an act of god to get it to appear (you can't just hover, you have to two-finger scroll first). And then in order to get it to stay, you need to keep your mouse horizontally positioned on th…

I've found most macOS software is actually pretty good at respecting the scrollbar visibility preference, not that we should expect anything less given how often we are told that the Mac is where you go for good UX, and that software developers for it know what they're doing.

(Acrobat recently got this wrong, and I was hearted to discover there's a fairly active thread an the Adobe forums about how much of a fuckup this is. I am not alone! I added a comment or two, of course)

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#122

Post by phkahler »

rr808 wrote: post #102

I was going to add to the complaints but realized I always scroll with touchpad or drag up/down on my phone. Maybe scroll bars are kind of obsolete except for visual clues.

>> Maybe scroll bars are kind of obsolete except for visual clues.

On mobile maybe. On desktop absolutely not. And in that case it's detrimental for them to be small.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#123

Post by tom_ »

ryokeken wrote: post #62
rubyfan wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it ironic that in order for your comment to be accessible the reader must lookup “a11y” to find that it means “accessibility”.

duuuuuude for real a11y? what kind of weird lingo flex is that?

It's a longstanding abbreviation for "accessibility", along the same lines of i18n being an abbreviation for internationalisation. There's the first letter, and the last letter, and between them a count of the number of letters elidded.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#124

Post by cameronh90 »

kvonhorn wrote: post #45

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.

I'm not yet 40 but it's the other way round for me. I have bad floaters so a white background makes them stand out.

One really good thing in the last five years has been most major user interfaces now having both a dark mode and a light mode.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#125

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #43
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe the solution is to improve the accessibility tools, not hack scrollbars I doubt you meant it, but your post reads like you're advocating less-abled people purchase (often expensive) eye-trackers instead of making scrollbars generally more usable for everyone.

The article specifically mentions eye tracker users as an affected group. Everybody who tries to actually use the scroll bar as a handle (rather than a non-interactive position indicator for use with the other scrolling methods) would have a problem, because they're not really meant to be used that way and most people don't use them that way (which is why they keep shrinking). Unfortunately the article doesn't mentio…

> because they're not really meant to be used that way

...how do you think people scrolled documents in Word before mice had scroll-wheels?

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#126

Post by rendaw »

Scrollbars are terrible, but it's crazy that instead of improving them they just got rid of them, like saying "well let's pretend this problem doesn't exist".

When you have a huge page, the drag island becomes miniscule. They at least set a minimum height for it, but you still need to carefully hunt for it.

When you have a huge page, dragging the island jumps a huge amount, sometimes multiple pages.

Scrolling gradually requires keeping your finger firmly on the mouse button which screws up your hand muscles.

When infinite scrolling the cursor keeps smacking into the bottom of the screen, or loading new content causes the absolute scroll to suddenly jump pages.

Removing the island, having scroll non-linear based on movement distance, double clicking for absolute movement, an interaction for continuous scrolling (right click?), etc. Or maybe doing something like youtube does with the video scrollbar, pulling up for zoom in etc. There's a million things to try here... and what they do try is sweeping it under the rug.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#128

Post by tapanjk »

nine_k wrote: post #59

The author sees half the problem and offers the worse half of a solution. 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 e…

Talking about scolling alone, the PgUp and PgDwn keys on my big honking external keyboard are life savers.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#129

Post by tom_ »

amanzi wrote: post #28
rubyfan wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it ironic that in order for your comment to be accessible the reader must lookup “a11y” to find that it means “accessibility”.

First time hearing the term a11y for me too. I hope to never come across it again.

I claim your time would be better spent figuring out why it makes you unhappy and working out how to not mind it - this is a somewhat common means of abbreviation, and you'll probably encounter it again.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#130

Post by Tempest1981 »

Can we talk about window borders? I have multiple overlapping VS Code windows open, all with black backgrounds and black borders. No drop shadows.

It's impossible to see where one windows frame/border is, sitting on top of another. This should be an OS thing, but apparently it's an app thing.

And VS Code "withdrew" support for configuring borders: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/160159

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