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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

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.

whstl 1y ago
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.
- catapart 1y ago
  Give me an example of a real-world use case where this caused you an issue, and I'll show you where their UX design is poorly made, rather than a need for selectable text in a clickable element.
  - whstl 1y ago
    Sure, I had one recently. There is a certain page of one of the Bundesagentur für Arbeit websites that doesn't play well with automatic translation. I speak B2 level German, but even then some of the technical terms are still complicated or unknown for me. This included one very long German word that was in a BIG RED button and the text in the big red button was not selectable, in the manner described in the article.
    - catapart 1y ago
      > that doesn't play well with automatic translation. I think I found your problem. Not sure why you think the solution is to make everything work worse for keyboard users.
      - whstl 1y ago
        And you still haven't explained why normal-selectable websites like HN itself are bad for keyboard users.
        anthk 1y ago
        I use HN from Links daily, on a terminal. It's perfectly usable.
        TeMPOraL 1y ago
        That's cheating. Terminal is in a sense the ultimate accessibility viewer, but few things work with existing terminal browsers I know of. Makes me wonder though, if anyone tried to take a SOTA screen reader/accessibility software, and use it to re-render the page purely from the "how the screen reader sees it" perspective (obviously with selectable text)?
      - Ukv 1y ago
        Worse in what way? For keyboard use, I want text to be selectable, since I'll often use shift + arrow keys while reading.
- ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 1y ago
  Hacker news isn't "fully selectable". Just try to highlight the text in the reply/update/submit buttons.
  - dylan604 1y ago
    I can select the word "Reply" with no issues
    - ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 1y ago
      Inside the button? Not the link? What OS/Browser?
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      - ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 1y ago
        I just tried this with every major OS and browser. I don't think it is possible. You can highlight the buttons (most times) in Safari on MacOS, but you can't select the text and copy it or translate it.
        whstl 1y ago
        You can copy <button>Text</button> in some browsers, but not when it's in <input text="Text">.
        ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 1y ago
        Yeah, in HN's case: <input value="reply" type="submit">
      - dylan604 1y ago
        Sorry, you're correct. It was the link not the button. My brain gets confused talking to people using technical words correctly instead of normies that call the link a button
brandonhorst 1y ago
While I agree with you in general, keep in mind that there are plenty of languages where seeing the characters doesn't give you any info about how to type them. No copy-paste means you'd need to rely on OCR.
Phemist 1y ago
I would argue that a word is typable is an edge case, especially dealing with another language. You can type words in basic latin script, sure, but you forget words with letters with diacritics, or even all words in non-latin script. In these cases OCR is also not necessarily reliable.
klausa 1y ago
I needed to translate a button on a Chinese website to buy a train ticket three days ago. How would you have me type it?
- catapart 1y ago
  Same way I do: with your OS's on-screen keyboard.
  - klausa 1y ago
    Congratulations on being fluent in Hanzi, I guess, but that does not solve a problem for the vast majority of the users.
    - catapart 1y ago
      I don't even understand it; I just can recognize a character and type it in. The only time I have to do so is in looking at poorly designed firmware sites and stuff like that, but I manage when the developers do not accomodate for me. But that's not what the topic is. The topic is HOW developers should accomodate users. And I'm simply taking the stance that preventing user selectability is a lesser evil in specific cases than universal selectability, because the former can be mitigated with less scripting overhead than the latter.
      - whstl 1y ago
        A native Chinese high school graduate is generally expected to know around 3500 characters. A middle school student, 2500-3000. For Kanji the numbers are around 2136 and 1200 and respectively. If you know the language, then you don't need this. But if you're claiming that you can type a random Hanzi or Kanji character you see in an interface without speaking the language, you are either missing something here or not arguing in good faith.
        catapart 1y ago
        [flagged]
Arainach 1y ago
>not that onerous to type it If the word uses the exact character set on your keyboard, sure. How am I going to type Kanji?
- fkyoureadthedoc 1y ago
  by pointing your phone at it by screenshotting it and copying the text out of the screenshot by putting a screenshot itself into chatgpt I'm curious what real world scenario you've imagined yourself in with a kanji button that you don't understand within the rest of a website in kanji that you do understand, but don't know how to type kanji?
  - klausa 1y ago
    Would you say any of these are "not that onerous" compared to copying the character? The argument here isn't that it's _impossible_ to do that with copying disabled, it's that it's _more annoying_. By providing a list of _more annoying_ ways to do something, you're reinforcing the argument, not refuting it.
    - fkyoureadthedoc 1y ago
      yes it's absolutely just as easy to screenshot something to my clipboard and paste it, as to try and select text from a button without clicking it. yes it's absolutely just as easy to point my phone's translate app at the button. any more questions?
      - klausa 1y ago
        We seem to have very different concepts of either what is "easy" or fine motor skills. I also find it rather difficult to point my phone at itself when trying to translate a word it's currently displaying; but maybe that's also a skill issue.
        fkyoureadthedoc 1y ago
petsfed 1y ago
Yeah, because fuck people who require additional accessibility options, right? On top of the real concerns around otherwise selectable text in a writing system not supported by the user's keyboard, there's also the issue of whether or not they can even operate enough of a keyboard to transcribe whatever text they want to translate.
- fkyoureadthedoc 1y ago
  > Yeah, because fuck people who require additional accessibility options, right? Just do whatever you want and then listen to your actual users' feedback. I worked on an application that I had to make button text not selectable because the old people using it kept selecting text on the buttons by mistake instead of clicking/activating the button and getting stuck during a clinical trial. Should I have left it selectable to pass the HN accessibility shamers purity tests, or listened to the users?
  - catapart 1y ago
    Thank you! Feels great to hear from another dev whom clearly has some shared experience with me. I can't count the screen-reader and keyboard-navigation based tickets I've had to field, but when it comes to translations, I haven't had a problem one. I empathize with translation, as I have to do it to pretty much every chipset firmware documentation I come across. So I just don't really understand where all of these issues are occurring with people not being able to translate stuff. Feels like a lot of people are maybe using a lot of websites that they aren't the target users for...
    - fkyoureadthedoc 1y ago
      Also worth noting that input[type=button|submit] are also by default user-select: none from the browser user agent stylesheet.
  - TeMPOraL 1y ago
    > Just do whatever you want and then listen to your actual users' feedback. That's good advice. But there's an important caveat: telemetry is not user feedback. This is where "data driven" approach often fails in practice: telemetry isn't feedback, it's evidence you gather to help you guess the user feedback in lieu of actually getting it. When that's not understood and given proper care (which is approximately always, because everyone has too little time and too many stakeholders breathing down their necks), it's very easy to just find proof for your own preconceptions in the data stream.
myfonj 1y ago
> If you really need to translate ONE WORD, it's not that onerous to type it. I'm confident that I can type just a tiny fraction of all Latin characters all world languages use. I'm sure that pretty much any Vietnamese word is way beyond my keyboard layout. No clue about writing any non-Latin script. Can you type any Cyrillic, Kanji, Hebrew, Abjad, …, character you see?
- dabinat 1y ago
  There are also a bunch of characters in other languages that look identical or almost-identical to ASCII characters. It’s very difficult to tell the difference with the naked eye. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack
dghlsakjg 1y ago
Do me a favor and type this into a translation app without selecting it:政府
JoshTriplett 1y ago
> If you really need to translate ONE WORD, it's not that onerous to type it. I just spent several weeks traveling in a country where I have no ability to either type or name any of the characters in the alphabet. Yes, it'd be onerous. Some of the websites I had to deal with also prevented text selection, or presented text as images.
TeMPOraL 1y ago
It's not about keyboard use, but about people worried those pesky users all just want to steal or plagiarize the intellectual property that is the website.

whstl 1y ago

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.

catapart 1y ago
Give me an example of a real-world use case where this caused you an issue, and I'll show you where their UX design is poorly made, rather than a need for selectable text in a clickable element.
- whstl 1y ago
  Sure, I had one recently. There is a certain page of one of the Bundesagentur für Arbeit websites that doesn't play well with automatic translation. I speak B2 level German, but even then some of the technical terms are still complicated or unknown for me. This included one very long German word that was in a BIG RED button and the text in the big red button was not selectable, in the manner described in the article.
  - catapart 1y ago
    > that doesn't play well with automatic translation. I think I found your problem. Not sure why you think the solution is to make everything work worse for keyboard users.
    - whstl 1y ago
      And you still haven't explained why normal-selectable websites like HN itself are bad for keyboard users.
      - anthk 1y ago
        I use HN from Links daily, on a terminal. It's perfectly usable.
        TeMPOraL 1y ago
        That's cheating. Terminal is in a sense the ultimate accessibility viewer, but few things work with existing terminal browsers I know of. Makes me wonder though, if anyone tried to take a SOTA screen reader/accessibility software, and use it to re-render the page purely from the "how the screen reader sees it" perspective (obviously with selectable text)?
    - Ukv 1y ago
      Worse in what way? For keyboard use, I want text to be selectable, since I'll often use shift + arrow keys while reading.
ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 1y ago
Hacker news isn't "fully selectable". Just try to highlight the text in the reply/update/submit buttons.
- dylan604 1y ago
  I can select the word "Reply" with no issues
  - ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 1y ago
    Inside the button? Not the link? What OS/Browser?
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 1y ago
      I just tried this with every major OS and browser. I don't think it is possible. You can highlight the buttons (most times) in Safari on MacOS, but you can't select the text and copy it or translate it.
      - whstl 1y ago
        You can copy <button>Text</button> in some browsers, but not when it's in <input text="Text">.
        ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 1y ago
        Yeah, in HN's case: <input value="reply" type="submit">
    - dylan604 1y ago
      Sorry, you're correct. It was the link not the button. My brain gets confused talking to people using technical words correctly instead of normies that call the link a button

brandonhorst 1y ago

While I agree with you in general, keep in mind that there are plenty of languages where seeing the characters doesn't give you any info about how to type them. No copy-paste means you'd need to rely on OCR.

Phemist 1y ago

I would argue that a word is typable is an edge case, especially dealing with another language. You can type words in basic latin script, sure, but you forget words with letters with diacritics, or even all words in non-latin script. In these cases OCR is also not necessarily reliable.

klausa 1y ago

I needed to translate a button on a Chinese website to buy a train ticket three days ago. How would you have me type it?

catapart 1y ago
Same way I do: with your OS's on-screen keyboard.
- klausa 1y ago
  Congratulations on being fluent in Hanzi, I guess, but that does not solve a problem for the vast majority of the users.
  - catapart 1y ago
    I don't even understand it; I just can recognize a character and type it in. The only time I have to do so is in looking at poorly designed firmware sites and stuff like that, but I manage when the developers do not accomodate for me. But that's not what the topic is. The topic is HOW developers should accomodate users. And I'm simply taking the stance that preventing user selectability is a lesser evil in specific cases than universal selectability, because the former can be mitigated with less scripting overhead than the latter.
    - whstl 1y ago
      A native Chinese high school graduate is generally expected to know around 3500 characters. A middle school student, 2500-3000. For Kanji the numbers are around 2136 and 1200 and respectively. If you know the language, then you don't need this. But if you're claiming that you can type a random Hanzi or Kanji character you see in an interface without speaking the language, you are either missing something here or not arguing in good faith.
      - catapart 1y ago
        [flagged]

Arainach 1y ago

>not that onerous to type it If the word uses the exact character set on your keyboard, sure. How am I going to type Kanji?

fkyoureadthedoc 1y ago
by pointing your phone at it by screenshotting it and copying the text out of the screenshot by putting a screenshot itself into chatgpt I'm curious what real world scenario you've imagined yourself in with a kanji button that you don't understand within the rest of a website in kanji that you do understand, but don't know how to type kanji?
- klausa 1y ago
  Would you say any of these are "not that onerous" compared to copying the character? The argument here isn't that it's _impossible_ to do that with copying disabled, it's that it's _more annoying_. By providing a list of _more annoying_ ways to do something, you're reinforcing the argument, not refuting it.
  - fkyoureadthedoc 1y ago
    yes it's absolutely just as easy to screenshot something to my clipboard and paste it, as to try and select text from a button without clicking it. yes it's absolutely just as easy to point my phone's translate app at the button. any more questions?
    - klausa 1y ago
      We seem to have very different concepts of either what is "easy" or fine motor skills. I also find it rather difficult to point my phone at itself when trying to translate a word it's currently displaying; but maybe that's also a skill issue.
      - fkyoureadthedoc 1y ago

petsfed 1y ago

Yeah, because fuck people who require additional accessibility options, right? On top of the real concerns around otherwise selectable text in a writing system not supported by the user's keyboard, there's also the issue of whether or not they can even operate enough of a keyboard to transcribe whatever text they want to translate.

fkyoureadthedoc 1y ago
> Yeah, because fuck people who require additional accessibility options, right? Just do whatever you want and then listen to your actual users' feedback. I worked on an application that I had to make button text not selectable because the old people using it kept selecting text on the buttons by mistake instead of clicking/activating the button and getting stuck during a clinical trial. Should I have left it selectable to pass the HN accessibility shamers purity tests, or listened to the users?
- catapart 1y ago
  Thank you! Feels great to hear from another dev whom clearly has some shared experience with me. I can't count the screen-reader and keyboard-navigation based tickets I've had to field, but when it comes to translations, I haven't had a problem one. I empathize with translation, as I have to do it to pretty much every chipset firmware documentation I come across. So I just don't really understand where all of these issues are occurring with people not being able to translate stuff. Feels like a lot of people are maybe using a lot of websites that they aren't the target users for...
  - fkyoureadthedoc 1y ago
    Also worth noting that input[type=button|submit] are also by default user-select: none from the browser user agent stylesheet.
- TeMPOraL 1y ago
  > Just do whatever you want and then listen to your actual users' feedback. That's good advice. But there's an important caveat: telemetry is not user feedback. This is where "data driven" approach often fails in practice: telemetry isn't feedback, it's evidence you gather to help you guess the user feedback in lieu of actually getting it. When that's not understood and given proper care (which is approximately always, because everyone has too little time and too many stakeholders breathing down their necks), it's very easy to just find proof for your own preconceptions in the data stream.

myfonj 1y ago

> If you really need to translate ONE WORD, it's not that onerous to type it. I'm confident that I can type just a tiny fraction of all Latin characters all world languages use. I'm sure that pretty much any Vietnamese word is way beyond my keyboard layout. No clue about writing any non-Latin script. Can you type any Cyrillic, Kanji, Hebrew, Abjad, …, character you see?

dabinat 1y ago
There are also a bunch of characters in other languages that look identical or almost-identical to ASCII characters. It’s very difficult to tell the difference with the naked eye. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack

dghlsakjg 1y ago

Do me a favor and type this into a translation app without selecting it:政府

JoshTriplett 1y ago

> If you really need to translate ONE WORD, it's not that onerous to type it. I just spent several weeks traveling in a country where I have no ability to either type or name any of the characters in the alphabet. Yes, it'd be onerous. Some of the websites I had to deal with also prevented text selection, or presented text as images.

TeMPOraL 1y ago

It's not about keyboard use, but about people worried those pesky users all just want to steal or plagiarize the intellectual property that is the website.