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Just let me select text

aartaka.me

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Re: Just let me select text

#51

Post by catapart »

djtango wrote: post #45
catapart wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When text becomes selected, instead of allowing the control to work as expected, the focus cannot move between the elements as expected. It breaks the UX for keyboard-only users. I can appreciate that this is not something everyone has to contend with, but for accessibility's sake, the default behavior should at the very least be mitigated. So you're advocating for either hurting the keyboard experience or injecting…

I personally like to click text absent mindedly when I'm reading a bit like holding your finger while reading Also if you're a non native speaker you want to be able to select the text so you can translate it

Why would you want to translate "My Account" into another language?

And, more pertinently, why should I support it, at the expense of keyboard-only users?

Re: Just let me select text

#52

Post by 3036e4 »

Teams refused to let me copy text from the real-time captions, even showing a popup to say it wasn't allowed. But after the meeting in the posted transcript I could copy the same text anyway so not sure why it was so important to prevent me from copying immediately. Very annoying since I wanted that text right then and not later.

Re: Just let me select text

#53

Post by catapart »

whstl wrote: post #43
catapart wrote: post #21

As a web dev, I fully agree with this, but with a huge exception: clickable text. Anything that is meant to be read as content should absolutely, without fail, be selectable and copyable (assuming appropriate permissions). But stuff like tab headers, buttons, or even text-sparse tiles - things meant for the user to click on - can, and usually should , prevent text selection. It is super annoying to be clicking back a…

100% disagree. Not everyone is fluent in every language, and not every website works perfectly with the browser's translator. There will be situations where people will want to translate that ONE word that is actually in a button or tab, and isn't selectable because someone thought they knew better.

isn't selectable because it breaks the UX for keyboard-only users.

Has nothing to do with "thinking" anything. It's about testing with accessibility parameters and knowing* what practical problems occur.

If you really need to translate ONE WORD, it's not that onerous to type it. You're bringing edge-case hypotheticals to a discussion about practical functionality.

Re: Just let me select text

#54

Post by whstl »

catapart wrote: post #53
whstl wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% disagree. Not everyone is fluent in every language, and not every website works perfectly with the browser's translator. There will be situations where people will want to translate that ONE word that is actually in a button or tab, and isn't selectable because someone thought they knew better.

isn't selectable because it breaks the UX for keyboard-only users. Has nothing to do with "thinking" anything. It's about testing with accessibility parameters and knowing* what practical problems occur. If you really need to translate ONE WORD, it's not that onerous to type it. You're bringing edge-case hypotheticals to a discussion about practical functionality.

I already asked below, how and where does it break?

Hacker News is fully selectable, and still fully useable with the keyboard.

> it's not that onerous to type it.

Yes it is, if I don't even know what the letters are. Not every country uses the latin alphabet. And not every people coming to latin-alphabet countries know what those letters are.

Re: Just let me select text

#55

Post by shadowgovt »

Oh, God yes.

I've often thought that this is actually a fundamental failure in mouse-and-screen based UI that we sadly didn't catch early enough in the design of the desktop. One of the mouse buttons should be dedicated to text selection and able to select any text. Document contents, browser contents, the text in an error message or a button... It should all be selectable and there should be a dedicated button for it. That frees up the other buttons to only ever mean "interact with something interactable."

(No suggestions for how we'd do this in touch; touch just has a different metaphor).

Re: Just let me select text

#56

Post by setgree »

I wonder if Bumble/Hinge/etc. set profiles to be non-searchable as a kind of minimum barrier to doxxing. I have many objections to modern dating apps [0], but there's an actual tradeoff/problem here that they're trying to deal with. I don't think that uploading a screenshot to ChatGPT/Claude to figure out the translation is an unreasonable ask.

[0] https://setharielgreen.com/blog/date-me-docs-obviously/

Re: Just let me select text

#57

Post by ginko »

catapart wrote: post #48
huimang wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This breaks translation. Text must be selectable.

Good UX means including translations for supported languages, not telling the user "do it yourself by highlighting content". Not translating entire articles to a language you don't support has the easy remedy of letting people select the text and use third party tools to support their specific use-cases. But not including translations for your clickable content for languages that aren't supported are the literal prac…

What about unsupported languages?

Re: Just let me select text

#58

Post by [deleted] »

magnio wrote: post #7

On Android, long press home button activates Google Assistant that can OCR the current screen and translate immediately. Unironically one of the only two features keeping me on Android until now.

[deleted]

Re: Just let me select text

#60

Post by catapart »

whstl wrote: post #49
catapart wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When text becomes selected, instead of allowing the control to work as expected, the focus cannot move between the elements as expected. It breaks the UX for keyboard-only users. I can appreciate that this is not something everyone has to contend with, but for accessibility's sake, the default behavior should at the very least be mitigated. So you're advocating for either hurting the keyboard experience or injecting…

What's that behavior? Do you have an example of a website where selectable text makes keyboard navigation not possible? Could this be a browser problem? I can tab between links here in HN and it's perfectly also selectable.

Use a mouse to click inside of a word link (like "threads") in the HN header. Try to drag to highlight. Note that the link tries to drag instead of highlighting. This is default behavior for anchors because of the issues that it would otherwise cause with the whole selection API.

Alternatively, set your cursor at the end of the header in the empty space, and drag your mouse backward to highlight the items. At that point, you can highlight the text, because you started in a non-user-select-limited area.

Note that this is default browser behavior. Inspect the styles and see that they have applied no selection styling to those anchors. This is the thing I'm advocating for. Make the web work like the web works, and disregard people telling you that "everything must be selectable" not because it shouldn't be, but because there are features that expect certain functionality to work well with the other features of the web.

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