https://aartaka.me/select-text.html

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Just Let Me Select Text

By Artyom Bologov
Oh, I see you disabled JavaScript. Keep up the good work, my fellow
cleanweb person!
A light thumbnail saying "TEX" with a text cursor after the end of it
resembling "T". "TEXT", in other words. "EX" is highlighted with a
bright pink overlay mimicking web browser selection. In the corners,
attributions to "Artyom Bologov" and "aartaka.me" are visible with Ts
and Vs stylized as text cursors.

Untranslatable Bios #

I'm lonely. Like everyone-ish else. Naturally, I'm on Bumble.
(Because Tinder is a rape-friendly lure trap.) When work calls get
boring I inevitably start swiping (mostly left )

There are lots of tourists in Armenia in the summer. From all over
the world really. Speaking a stupefying range of languages. With bios
and prompt answers in these numerous languages. Not necessarily
discernible to me due to my language learning stagnation.

So there's this profile of a pretty German girl. With bio and prompts
in (an undeniably beautiful) German. Speaking English, she made the
decision to use her mother tongue for the bio. A totally valid
choice.

So I want to know the story she tells with her profile:

  * Select her bio,
  * copy it,
  * paste into a translator,
  * look up the exact meaning of some mistranslated German word,
  * and realize the unexpected poetic meaning she put into these 300
    chars.

Except... I can't do that. The text is not selectable/copyable in
Bumble app. I have to do a bunch of relatively unsurmountable steps
to do what should've taken half a minute. Like screenshot the profile
and scrape the text with iOS Photos text recognition. Or use some OCR
(web)app elsewhere. It's... discouraging. Thus I give up and swipe
left. A shame--she was beautiful at the very least!

Media #

By making the text in your UI non-selectable, you turn it into... an
image essentially? Images, audio, video, and interactive JS-heavy
pages are multidimentional media. Not really manipulable and
referenceable in any reasonable way. (Not even with Media
Fragments--they were turned down by everyone.) You lose a whole
dimension () of functionality and benefit by going with such media
or their semblance text.

Podcasts are not easy to roll back to useful part. Video transcripts
don't make sense without the visuals. Web graphics are opaque
<canvas>-es you can't gut.

Text is copyable. Text is translatable. Text is accessible (as in
a11y.) Text is lightweight. Text is fundamental to how we people
process information.

That's why we still use text in our UIs. We want to convey the
meaning. We strive to provide unambiguous instructions. We need to be
understood. So why make the text harder to process and understand?

Stop It #

Whenever you disable text selection/copying on your UI, you commit a
crime against the user. Crime against comprehension. Crime against
accessibility. Crime against the meaning. Stop incapacitating your
users, allow them to finally use the text.

But why might one even do that?

Some reasons and their rebuttals:

Copyright--preventing content scraping
    Most of the scraping is done by bots, not humans copy-pasting
    text. Disabling selection does nothing to these. It only breaks
    users' workflows and makes your site less friendly.
UI clickability/draggability
    Some UIs are really interactive and need a click/drag to be
    unambiguous on some elements. The downside is that bug reports
    from users can't reference the exact UI element that's broken.
    Wording is important.
Mimicking for native/professional apps
    So petty, going against the user in pursuit of some ephemeral
    image. Focus. On. The. User.

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