[HN Gopher] Just let me select text
___________________________________________________________________
Just let me select text
Author : ayoisaiah
Score : 685 points
Date : 2025-09-24 13:56 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (aartaka.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (aartaka.me)
| MattDamonSpace wrote:
| Agreed with the overall sentiment but screenshot+immediate text
| select on iOS/Mac has solved 99% of my issues here
|
| Technology!
| dhosek wrote:
| Which the OP acknowledges, but it's an extra step (and one that
| a lot of people don't realize is possible) that shouldn't be
| necessary.
| aartaka wrote:
| Right, the more steps there are in the process, the more
| people just drop and forget it.
| hyperhello wrote:
| How are they going to make money letting you do what you want?
| furyofantares wrote:
| Is it a troll that the text on this page isn't selectable?
|
| edit: It is intentional for sure, the other entries in this blog
| have selectable text.
| simianparrot wrote:
| Yet I can't select text on this very blog.
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| > Whenever you disable text selection/copying on your UI, you
| commit a crime against the user. [... comprehension ...
| accessibility ... meaning]
|
| Exquisite bait m'lord!
|
| ... or maybe the word that's connected to hippo and rhymes with
| "crisy"
| pabs3 wrote:
| You can select the text by disabling CSS.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Or by visiting a rendering which doesn't support CSS at all:
| eg https://aartaka.me/select-text.txt
| aartaka wrote:
| This hack is exactly why I do multi-format posts.
| leftnode wrote:
| I think that's the point...
| simianparrot wrote:
| I presume so but it adds nothing to the topic sh(V[?]V)S
| aartaka wrote:
| It does add a comic effect, so I consider it quite useful.
| 16bytes wrote:
| Given that text is selectable elsewhere on the site, I suspect
| that the author is trying to make a point by that.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| The irony here being that text cannot be selected in this post...
| Aldipower wrote:
| I upvoted you. This is really an irony. Hilarious.
| aartaka wrote:
| Made it for y'all, it's cool you noticed!
| magnio wrote:
| 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.
| Aaargh20318 wrote:
| On iOS 26 you can do basically the same thing. Take a
| screenshot (power button + volume up), click the thumbnail of
| the screenshot that appears. You'll see the screenshot full
| screen and there is a 'translate' button (along some other AI
| stuff).
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| macOS does this, too, along with other text manipulation
| features in screenshots and arbitrary image and video files
| opened in Preview, QuickTime Player (and apps using an
| embedded player), and Safari. High quality, local, system-
| provided OCR is a godsend sometimes.
| cptskippy wrote:
| Unless the App Developer has chosen to blanket deny
| screenshots. This is common on view accepting payment
| information but blanket application is also common.
| cubefox wrote:
| I prefer this easy solution: Print the website (with a
| printer), take a photo of the printed page, run the photo
| through OCR software. As simple as that.
| RandomBacon wrote:
| I prefer this easy solution: Take a photograph of the
| website, develop the film, send it off to a transcription
| service, received the printed copy in the mail, take a
| digital picture of the document, run it through OCR software.
| As simple as that.
| acheron wrote:
| Need to make sure you take a picture of it on a wooden
| table. https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Web_0_0x2e_1
| twism wrote:
| All text is selectable on the app switcher granted it uses OCR
| so YMMV
| morsch wrote:
| I had no idea that was a thing, neat!
| gsa wrote:
| Like with all things Google, this feature wasn't available in
| Gemini (or only available on some devices) last I checked. With
| Gemini going to replace Google Assistant in the future, this is
| yet another useful feature that Google will be taking away from
| Android.
| cubefox wrote:
| If you open an image with Google Lens (or select the image in
| the Google Search app, which seems to result in the same
| thing) Google does by default an image web search and shows
| you similar pictures, but it also displays a blue "translate"
| button on the right, which activates OCR and text selection,
| and optional translation. Though it doesn't seem possible to
| avoid it doing the image web search first, which might be
| problematic for private pictures.
| gsa wrote:
| That's a very different flow with a much higher friction
| compared to simply long pressing the home button in any
| app.
| cubefox wrote:
| Yeah. (What would be the equivalent to long pressing the
| home button when Android gestures are used, and there is
| no home button?)
| hahn-kev wrote:
| I use it for translation all the time on my Pixel 7a with
| Gemini
| nmeofthestate wrote:
| Interesting. I screenshot then send to Google Lens which is
| obviously more of a hassle than what you're describing. But I
| have gestures enabled and so no home button. I wonder what is
| the gesture-equivalent of long-pressing on home.
| sadeshmukh wrote:
| Press and hold bottom line - I use it regularly
| DangitBobby wrote:
| On my Pixel 5, if you swipe from the bottom bar up (as if you
| are gesturing to close the app), near the bottom some options
| will appear: Screenshot or Select. The Select mode is an OCR
| enabled text selection.
| nmeofthestate wrote:
| This just takes me to the horizontal scrolling list of apps
| displayed as screenshots of the app. I can swipe from the
| bottom corner to bring up "Gemini" but that doesn't have an
| option to OCR the screen. Android is so diverse - people
| always end up talking about their unique and differing
| experiences, unfortunately.
| ritzaco wrote:
| yeah definitely my favourite feature on android too that I use
| multiple times per day. Unlike the people saying taking a
| screenshot is basically the same on iOS - no it isn't. This
| moves the whole display into an ephemeral screenshot and you
| can copy text, translate, all kinds of things, without the
| delay of taking a screenshot, or worrying about that file
| hanging around permanently after.
|
| Super ironic that often images are the most accessible way to
| share text data these days but that's what enshittification
| brought us.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > activates Google Assistant that can OCR the current screen
|
| =>
|
| > activates Google Assistant that can copy a bunch of your
| personal data for eternal storage with Alphabet, building your
| personal profile there - with your permission, instead of them
| having to find some kind of excuse to obtain it
|
| There, I fixed that for you.
| cyphax wrote:
| It greeted me with a message: "Oh, I see you disabled JavaScript.
| Keep up the good work, my fellow cleanweb person!" which is an
| interesting departure from the usual "this app won't work without
| javascript". But I couldn't select the text from the message to
| paste it here... while looking at the header above it "Just let
| me select text" I thought: yeah!
| pabs3 wrote:
| You can select the text by disabling CSS.
| captn3m0 wrote:
| or switching to the txt version: https://aartaka.me/select-
| text.txt
| beastman82 wrote:
| use android/ gemini circle to search
| KTibow wrote:
| I can see this comment was downvoted because it doesn't address
| the main point but Circle to Search is genuinely a good,
| helpful feature. It allows you to copy or translate text in two
| or three taps, even faster than if you had selection power, and
| I hope more platforms add similar functionality (even if just
| to work around the current terrible state of text selection).
| aartaka wrote:
| Not portable across different flavors of Android, but yeah,
| it's a solution too.
| encom wrote:
| [Trigger warning: Old man yells at cloud.] One of countless
| reasons I hate doing anything on my phone. Text selection is
| imprecise, slow and janky. Text input is slow and error prone,
| and autocorrect (or predictive text) produces danish with wrong
| grammar (so does Chrome). It's like using a computer with boxing
| gloves on. And despite phones now being huge, I prefer my triple
| monitor desktop. And also most apps are proprietary ad-ridden
| slop or borderline scams (Tinder, Happn, Hinge certainly leans
| heavily in that direction. I'd rather die alone than pay them
| money. I miss Ok-Cupid from 20 years ago.
| RandomBacon wrote:
| OkCupid sold out to Match, that's why they became crappy.
|
| (OkCupid also had an article saying why you should never pay
| for online dating, which coincidentally was taken down the same
| day they were acquired by Match.)
|
| Also, OkCupid gave people different prices based on whether
| they said they were a man or woman. I wonder if anyone ever
| sued them in a class action.
| aartaka wrote:
| Pure does that pricing thing too, and that kind of makes
| sense given how disproportionate privilege and
| "supply/demand" is on dating apps.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > It's like using a computer with boxing gloves on.
|
| I dunno. Even if I zoom so I can click precisely where I want
| to select or edit, my phone still insists on doing the
| operation in another place. And some places are just completely
| forbidden.
|
| Using a computer with boxing gloves ought to be a lot more
| precise than that.
| NoraCodes wrote:
| Given that this page has the following styles which aren't
| applied anywhere else on the blog: body {
| -webkit-user-select: none; -webkit-touch-callout:
| none; -moz-user-select: none; -ms-user-
| select: none; user-select: none; }
|
| I think it's safe to assume that being unable to select text on
| this page is not unintentional, as several comments here assume,
| nor "ironic", but an intentional effort to demonstrate how
| annoying this behavior is.
| encom wrote:
| In uBlock: *##html, body, body *:style(user-
| select: auto !important)
| Koffiepoeder wrote:
| Wouldn't recommend applying this _everywhere_; the `body *`
| selector may have a significant performance impact on some
| pages.
| d1sxeyes wrote:
| Not any more. All modern browser engines read right to
| left.
| nananana9 wrote:
| I don't know why so many comments are discussing "if it's
| intentional troll or hypocrisy", when it takes 10 seconds to
| check one of the other blog posts and see if the text there is
| selectable :(
| miltonlost wrote:
| Because people don't understand what a joke is sometimes,
| even on that's obvious like this.
| lukan wrote:
| Or some people just have a desire to vent of lots of that
| anger boiling inside them and are just looking for a excuse
| to shout at something ..
| aartaka wrote:
| That I can relate to, and that's how some of my blog
| posts get born. Like this one.
| aartaka wrote:
| That's a lot of work, and I don't expect all readers to open
| more than one page on my blog. But yeah, great that it
| sparked some debate.
| johanyc wrote:
| I have a bookmarklet just to deal with this kind of websites
| lol
| Dilettante_ wrote:
| Would you share perhaps?
| aartaka wrote:
| Yeah, do share it!
| moralestapia wrote:
| Are people these days so dense (i.e. stupid) they couldn't
| figure out it was a joke by the author?
| kulahan wrote:
| I recently read something that stated we've never really had
| more than 30% of students in the US at a level of
| mathematical understanding where they can tell that 3/4ths
| and 0.75 are the same thing, conceptually.
|
| I cannot stop thinking about this; it honestly explains so
| much.
| MPSimmons wrote:
| I would hope fervently that HackerNews would be subject to
| selection bias and would be an exception, but who knows.
| latexr wrote:
| The third-pound burger flopped because consumers failed to
| understand that one third is bigger than one fourth.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-
| pound_burger#Marketing_f...
| moralestapia wrote:
| Thanks for this, wow.
| lupire wrote:
| Should have promoted a quarter-plus-twelfth burger!
| That's about 37%!
| prmph wrote:
| Why complicate it: just advertise a fifth
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| With a price markup.
| phkahler wrote:
| Thank you! I heard that on the radio decades ago but
| never saw a source to point people to. Wikipedia, who
| knew?
| ninkendo wrote:
| That's probably one of those cases where they use two
| different statistics to assume a conclusion, e.g. maybe
| only 30% of students pass a particular profiency test, and
| then add to the fact that that test is the minimum level
| where fractions/percentages are expected to be known, and
| combine it to make a scary sounding headline.
|
| You might be right but, citation needed.
| kulahan wrote:
| Sure: https://www.nagb.gov/naep/mathematics.html
|
| Additionally: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/
|
| 22% of 12th graders are considered proficient in Math.
| This means:
|
| NAEP Basic - Apply single-step percentages to solve real-
| world problems.
|
| NAEP Proficient - Analyze information to solve real-world
| problems with proportional reasoning.
|
| NAEP Advanced - Solve multi-step, real-world problems
| using percentages.
| yorwba wrote:
| Specifically, for 12th-grade math, the cut scores are
| 141/300 for NAEP Basic, 176/300 for NAEP Proficient and
| 216/300 for NAEP Advanced. https://nces.ed.gov/nationsrep
| ortcard/mathematics/achieve.as...
|
| The score is an aggregate over questions testing many
| different skills, so while getting a low score suggests
| that a student is less skilled, it doesn't immediately
| tell you which skills they're bad at in particular. So
| this is exactly the scenario that 'ninkendo was talking
| about. If you want to know how many students correctly
| answered a specific question testing a certain skill, you
| would need the raw disaggregated data, which I don't
| think NAGB publishes.
|
| I'd like to add that it's intentional that there are
| substantial numbers of students in each of the four
| buckets defined by the three thresholds, since the goal
| is to track the performance of the overall population,
| not just a few very bad or exceptionally good students.
| kulahan wrote:
| I should've clarified it was an example, not that
| literally that one highly particular thing is what all
| American students are bad at, or that knowing .75 ==
| 3/4ths == 75% somehow causally affects your future or
| whatever.
| prmph wrote:
| Indeed, one thing I keep in mind is that almost all
| progress, social, technical, political, etc. are wrought by
| an exceedingly small proportion of people. These are
| usually the people derided as deviant, nonconforming,
| abnormal.
|
| Left to the vast majority of "normal" people who want to
| half-ass everything, there'd be absolutely no progress
| whatsoever, and what is more, society might actually fall
| apart.
| aartaka wrote:
| I like Kandinsky's metaphor of a flying pyramid with
| progressors at the tip and more down-to-the-earth people
| at the base. Such a good idea.
| DwnVoteHoneyPot wrote:
| Even harder to understand that 1 part vinegar and 3 parts
| olive oil isn't 1/3 vinegar.
| bregma wrote:
| One cup vinegar and three cups olive oil will give you
| four cups salad dressing.
| tredre3 wrote:
| Being unable to get the joke here implies that someone is
| obtuse or unable to grasp social cues (ie autism-adjacent),
| not that they are stupid.
|
| Which is further confirmed by the fact that HN's audience
| skews towards the former and away from the latter.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| I wouldn't make assumptions. There are a lot of people
| here...
| aartaka wrote:
| This is a good clarification, thank you.
| tuveson wrote:
| To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand the
| joke. The humour is extremely subtle, and without a solid
| grasp of CSS the joke will go over a typical viewer's head.
| There's also the author's nihilistic outlook, which is deftly
| woven into his post - his personal philosophy draws heavily
| from Chris Coyier's classic blogs, for instance. The fans
| understand this stuff; they have the intellectual capacity to
| truly appreciate the depths of this joke, to realise that
| it's not just funny - it says something deep about LIFE. As a
| consequence people who criticise being unable to select text
| within the blog post truly ARE idiots. I'm smirking right now
| just imagining one of those addlepated simpletons scratching
| their heads in confusion as Bologov's genius wit unfolds
| itself in their browsers. What fools.. how I pity them.
|
| And yes, by the way, i DO have a tattoo of the Lobotomized
| Owl selector. And no, you cannot see it. It's for the ladies'
| eyes only- and even then they have to demonstrate that
| they're within 5 IQ points of my own (preferably lower)
| beforehand. Nothin personnel kid.
| pmontra wrote:
| Nice catch. Luckily I can use uMatrix to disable css and select
| and copy the post. Oddly the selection is transparent. Firefox
| Android.
|
| > I'm lonely. Like everyone-ish else. Naturally, I'm on Bumble
| kokanee wrote:
| No browser extensions necessary, just right click > inspect
| element > select <body>, then turn off the CSS rules you
| don't want.
| aartaka wrote:
| There are many ways to bypass that. User scripts and user
| styles too. But the point is delivered: one can disable
| selection, with just a couple of lines of CSS/JS, and cause a
| lot of pain for the reader.
| bambax wrote:
| Yes but the joke is moot, because on the web, you can't really
| make text non-selectable (you can try, but it can be defeated
| extremely easily).
|
| In an app, undoing that is pretty much impossible (or at least,
| above my pay grade).
|
| This is one of a million reasons why apps are so bad.
| zahlman wrote:
| "Apps" of this sort are absolutely "on the web", and
| generally use browser engines to display the content. The
| real distinction IMO is between using a locked-down mobile
| interface vs. a full browser on a computer with an OS and UI
| intended to let you have that control.
| IshKebab wrote:
| I can pretty much guarantee that an app like Bumble is not
| a webview wrapper.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| But unlike Hinge, Bumble is usable on desktop (where
| getting the text would be a lot easier).
| aartaka wrote:
| You can never know nowadays. But yeah, it must be a
| native app, at least on iOS with its PWA-hostile
| policies.
| spullara wrote:
| on Mac/iOS you can just take a screenshot and then select out
| of the image.
| baby_souffle wrote:
| Google pixel devices have had this for years. It's one of
| the few things that keeps me glued to this platform.
|
| Just push the button to go to the task switch view and as
| long as the window preview thumbnail isn't blanked out, I
| can just get the phone to OCR any part of the screen in
| real time.
| zem wrote:
| whoa, didn't know I could do that! thanks for the tip.
| sixothree wrote:
| iPhone has had this for years.
| aartaka wrote:
| Yeah, and I think it was there for longer than on Pixels.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| Yup, I've used this for years. See also: not being able to
| select certain text without clicking a link (say, in a
| search result).
| Vinnl wrote:
| Alt+click avoids that in Firefox at least. Blew my mind
| when I learned about that, and I use it way more often
| than expected.
| tredre3 wrote:
| > In an app, undoing that is pretty much impossible (or at
| least, above my pay grade).
|
| In my experience it is above the average user's pay grade to
| work around it in a browser too. Even power users will
| probably give up if the usual ways don't work out (holding
| alt, browser extension, reader mode). The power-est of users
| might glimpse at the inspector, but they'll give up if the
| nodes are obfuscated.
|
| All this to say that with things like Circle To Search or
| Apple's built-in screenshot OCR nowadays websites and apps
| are finally on a level playing field when it comes to anyone
| being able to circumvent text protection.
| zahlman wrote:
| > nor "ironic", but an intentional effort to demonstrate how
| annoying
|
| That would in fact be a deliberate use of irony.
| Rendello wrote:
| I'm reminded of the Archer scene where he explains irony (in
| the middle of a car chase / gunfight), and then Pam asks:
|
| > Oh. Okay, so then what's satire?
|
| > Nobody really knows!
| lukan wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaFctEu3ETU
| Martin_Silenus wrote:
| People's stupidity will always surprise me. I mean... it's such
| a basic irony trick given the subject matter that it doesn't
| even deserve to be mentioned, let alone questioned.
| ncallaway wrote:
| Yep, it's clearly deliberate. It's also annoying enough that
| I'm not reading the text of the blog.
|
| I hope the author doesn't have any point beyond: "it's annoying
| to disable text selection"
| aartaka wrote:
| Lol, that's a good proof for my point. And a fun one at that!
| Thanks.
| jader201 wrote:
| Within seconds of opening the article, I tried selecting text,
| and upon realizing that I couldn't, I chuckled, knowing that it
| _had_ to be intentional.
| aartaka wrote:
| It was.
| aartaka wrote:
| You're right with your analysis, but I still find this device
| ironic in addition to what you said.
| amelius wrote:
| We need a browser extension that treats the rendered page as an
| image, then runs OCR over it, then converts that to something
| where text can be selected.
|
| Pros: 1. safer (what you see is what you select), 2. also works
| with images, 3. all text can be selected
| beardyw wrote:
| That's in Android. Long press the bar at the bottom to get the
| text in any app, and translate too. Just as you describe.
| Etheryte wrote:
| This is roughly what reader mode is, no? Safari ships it out of
| the box, although it's very hit or miss as far as my experience
| with it goes. But I like the idea.
| aartaka wrote:
| I wonder why Apple just doesn't use Readability.js instead of
| using a really crude set of heuristic they put into their own
| Reader Mode.
| frizlab wrote:
| Texts in images are searchable in Safari. Out of the box.
| crazygringo wrote:
| On iOS and Macs, just take a screenshot and then select the
| automatically OCR'd text. Works flawlessly.
| morkalork wrote:
| I run into this whenever I have to (begrudgingly) use
| Facebook/Instagram for something, it leaves a bad taste in my
| mouth it's just so blatently anti-user-friendly.
| catapart wrote:
| 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 and forth through tabs only to have some text erroneously
| highlight and then stay that way.
|
| Exceptions to every rule, and to every exception of that rule, of
| course. But for the most part, allowing text highlighting in
| those clickable areas is a rough UX.
|
| * note that I did _not_ include anchor links; those are meant to
| be inline within text content and should therefore be selectable.
| hkon wrote:
| I disagree. Selection takes priority.
| watwut wrote:
| Totally not, those ahould be selectable too.
| catapart wrote:
| 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 javascript to over-manage the experience.
|
| To each their own, but I'd rather neither of those things at
| the expense of not being able to select "Home", "My Account",
| "Settings", etc. Shit that nobody actually needs to select
| anyway.
| huimang wrote:
| This breaks translation. Text must be selectable.
| catapart wrote:
| 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 practical limits of ability. I would rather
| my apps work for people in languages I do support, with
| full accessibility (and minimal scripting overhead), than
| to have them work poorly for keyboard-only users in all
| languages, regardless of my app's support for them.
|
| Again, we're talking about the stuff that should be
| iconic. Things that can literally be represented by
| icons. Buttons and tab headings. Things that you
| shouldn't actually need translated AT ALL, much less into
| every single language there is.
| ginko wrote:
| What about unsupported languages?
| davorak wrote:
| Even when the language is supported I have had GDPR
| popups block that language selection. The text in the
| popup was also not selectable which made it very hard to
| read what I was or was not agreeing to.
| odo1242 wrote:
| What would be your ideal solution to the described
| problem? (Clicking on UI elements selecting text instead
| of processing the click)
| catapart wrote:
| I know you're not asking me, but I would really love the
| "copy" feature added to ALL context menus.
|
| Right clicking a standard anchor element gives you the
| "copy link" option, but you don't get to copy the word
| without having it selected. Would be nice to just have a
| "copy word" feature, for starters. Could even be expanded
| so that it auto-selects the text after copying it so that
| if you wanted to copy more than just one word, you could
| expand the highlight (with the little widgets on mobile,
| or with keyboard/mouse selection in that one state on
| desktop) and then get a "copy text" option that copies
| all of the selected content.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| It does give you the search this text option.
| djtango wrote:
| 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
| catapart wrote:
| 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?
| Ghoelian wrote:
| > Why would you want to translate "My Account" into
| another language?
|
| When you don't know the language or what "My Account"
| means? Not everyone speaks English.
| catapart wrote:
| And you also can't understand the icon? And the context?
| And the translations I provided?
| Ukv wrote:
| A menu with "Wo De Zhang Hu " in it, and often a generic
| icon or no icon at all, doesn't really have sufficient
| context to determine what the button means. If the
| website is already translated into your language then
| great, but many websites aren't (because it's a small
| site, or you don't speak one of the most common
| languages, or it's aimed at a different audience, etc.)
| catapart wrote:
| Ah, so the website had bad UX? I think we've found the
| issue!
| Ukv wrote:
| Bad UX is the result, from the combination of disabling
| text selection and being in a language you don't
| understand. Ideally both would be fixed - since
| unselectable text causes UX issues even when in a
| language I understand (when I want to select as I'm
| reading to keep place, or copy a partial link, or right
| click -> search/define a technical term, or copy-paste to
| tell someone what button to click, etc.)
| djtango wrote:
| If you want to experience the frustration of text not
| being text, take a look at one of the main train ticket
| booking websites in China https://www.12306.cn/index/
|
| Plain old text that can be selected is always going to be
| the most user friendly to non-native speaker users.
|
| The question then is on the balance of trade offs which
| user group experience is the one you want to cater more
| to, non native speakers or keyboard-only users.
|
| Edit: I love how one of the icons is Piao - perfectly
| self explanatory to Chinese speakers. Good luck if you
| don't speak Chinese which goes to show that icons are
| cultural to some degree
| whstl wrote:
| 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.
| catapart wrote:
| 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.
| whstl wrote:
| Then I don't think the article is advocating for what you
| think it is.
|
| You are saying "tab headers, buttons, or even text-sparse
| tiles [...] should, prevent text selection".
|
| The website is advocating for not disabling selection,
| not for enabling in random places.
| catapart wrote:
| I don't think you understand the technical applications
| that the website is advocating for. I can appreciate that
| the technicalities are frustrating, but the web works the
| way it works, for better or worse.
| whstl wrote:
| Nope.
|
| I am saying the web should work the way it is, like
| Hacker News does, as I already have brought up elsewhere.
|
| You are saying "tab headers, buttons, or even text-sparse
| tiles [...] should, prevent text selection".
|
| The article is saying the same thing I am. Basically
| don't do _`user-select: none;`_. The example is itself in
| the article 's CSS.
| Ukv wrote:
| > 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.
|
| You can drag slightly above/below to select it, or use
| shift + arrow keys. I personally use a plugin[0] to allow
| dragging within the text too, and haven't noticed any
| issues.
|
| [0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/drag-
| select-l...
|
| > Note that this is default browser behavior [...] This
| is the thing I'm advocating for.
|
| If you're just advocating for the default browser
| behaviour, which does somewhat allow selection of link
| text, then that may be worth clarifying above - since I
| think people are interpreting your comments as advocating
| for those buttons that prevent text selection entirely
| (and I'm not really sure how else to interpret "the
| default behavior should at the very least be mitigated").
| catapart wrote:
| I made myself clear to the other development
| professionals I was talking to as evidenced by their
| feedback.
|
| The people who seem to have the most trouble
| understanding what I'm advocating for are the people who
| seem to only be taking a user-centric approach to the
| situation, rather than grappling with the practicalities
| of the web environment.
|
| At this point, I'm over trying to make anyone understand
| anything. They'll either get it, when it is relevant for
| them to get it, or they won't and it won't matter to me
| or anyone else at all.
|
| In a year, we might have better web functionality or a
| new built-in browser or OS feature, or any number of
| other things that could mitigate this specific gripe, so
| I'm not super concerned about any of it. Those that
| understand what I'm saying will have better UX for
| heeding the advice with appropriate exception. And those
| that don't won't make UX worth using. No worries either
| way!
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Try to navigate inside the article, it doesn't work at
| all.
| whstl wrote:
| The article doesn't have selectable text.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Yeah that was the point. Disabling text selection also
| inhibits cursor movement even without selecting anything.
| whstl wrote:
| I asked "Do you have an example of a website where
| _selectable text_ makes keyboard navigation not possible
| " and you provided an website with non-selectable text.
| whstl wrote:
| 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.
| catapart wrote:
| _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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Sure, I had one recently.
|
| There is a certain page of one of the Bundesagentur fur
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| And you still haven't explained why normal-selectable
| websites like HN itself are bad for keyboard users.
| anthk wrote:
| I use HN from Links daily, on a terminal. It's perfectly
| usable.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Worse in what way? For keyboard use, I want text to be
| selectable, since I'll often use shift + arrow keys while
| reading.
| ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote:
| Hacker news isn't "fully selectable". Just try to
| highlight the text in the reply/update/submit buttons.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I can select the word "Reply" with no issues
| ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote:
| Inside the button? Not the link? What OS/Browser?
| ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| You can copy <button>Text</button> in some browsers, but
| not when it's in <input text="Text">.
| ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote:
| Yeah, in HN's case: <input
| value="reply" type="submit">
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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
| whstl wrote:
| I can select the word reply, like sibling poster said,
| but also the glyphs.
|
| https://imgur.com/hEDe7Vd
| ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote:
| Yeah, I removed the "glyphs" thing from my comment,
| because I realized they were SVG backgrounds, not
| actually text, but that is a common place to use user-
| select: none, on elements with font faces that are
| symbols.
|
| I am curious what operating system you can select text
| from the buttons on though. I might spin up browserstack
| to experiment.
| whstl wrote:
| macOS Safari
| ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote:
| Yeah, I just tried to select text in the button element
| and translate it specifically or copy it, and it doesn't
| work. You can highlight it, but you aren't selecting the
| text.
|
| This is what is copied from the login page, you can see
| that the button text is missing:
|
| Login
|
| username: password:
|
| Forgot your password?
|
| Create Account
|
| username: password:
| whstl wrote:
| My fault, I didn't try to copy! I can still select, but
| sorry for not checking if copy is possible! From your
| other reply I noticed this!
|
| But yeah, HN isn't the best in this regard :)
|
| Maybe dang will one day consider changing to
| <button>reply</button>!
| brandonhorst wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Same way I do: with your OS's on-screen keyboard.
| klausa wrote:
| Congratulations on being fluent in Hanzi, I guess, but
| that does not solve a problem for the vast majority of
| the users.
| catapart wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| homebrewer wrote:
| It's solvable through the handwriting input, although you
| do need to know the approximate order and direction of
| strokes or you will get nowhere. I know roughly zero
| Chinese characters and use this often-ish.
| whstl wrote:
| ...or just don't break the web with
| accessibility/usability breaking CSS in the first place.
| Arainach wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| good thing it can take a screenshot then
| petsfed wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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...
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _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.
| catapart wrote:
| lol
|
| Because "I'm not worried about users my application does
| not support"
|
| I'm sorry you are FORCED to use a bunch of apps that do
| not seem to respect you as a user. My apps respond to
| feedback from my users and their accessibility concerns
| are about selectable text in clickable content, NOT about
| having difficulty translating my apps. As far as I know,
| my apps are translated by whatever browser plugins or
| third-party tools those users who screenshot it for me
| are using. I only support six languages, but I get a lot
| of tickets from others, so I'm not sure where all this
| language stuff becomes an issue, but it doesn't seem to
| be a problem based on what I'm advocating for.
| myfonj wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Do me a favor and type this into a translation app without
| selecting it:Zheng Fu
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote:
| That is a i18n issue with the website itself? Or are you
| saying you know a good portion of a language, but you aren't
| fluent, so you read it in whatever the default language is,
| by default, without translating the page or using it in your
| native language?
| whstl wrote:
| Depends. Sometimes I know the language partially, sometimes
| I can move around using pure context, and other times
| translation is possible in most pages.
|
| Disabling selection in non-textual parts of websites is
| unfortunately something that happens quite frequently, but
| people rarely notice.
|
| This is naturally for websites without i18n. Very common
| especially in government and public websites.
| throwaway0123_5 wrote:
| In Firefox my tabs have text, and I frequently rearrange tabs
| with my cursor. I think this is a pretty common usage pattern
| (I do it on a daily basis). It would be an enormous pain if
| most of the area on the tab turned my arrow cursor into an
| I-beam cursor that I couldn't move the tab with. I checked
| Chrome and it looks like the tabs work the same way.
|
| While having the text in the tabs is very useful to know what
| is under them, I don't think I've ever needed to actually
| copy the tab text. It would be a huge UX downgrade for me
| (and I think most people) if the tab text was selectable.
|
| Some people might need it to be selectable for accessibility
| reasons and there should be a toggle for that, but I don't
| think "absolutely all text everywhere is selectable" is a
| good default.
| whstl wrote:
| The example I am answering to was prefaced as being by a
| web dev, so I am only talking about websites here.
|
| For Apps agree, as I can install different ones and pick
| the language regardless of where I am traveling, etc. And
| page titles (that go on browser tabs) rarely need
| selection/translation.
| yreg wrote:
| Why do you make a difference between tabs in a native app
| and in a web app? The optimal UX should be the same.
| TuringTest wrote:
| The essential case where it makes sense for text to be
| non-selectable is on objects that can be dragged around.
| You definitely don't want to get the text selected when
| the user wanted to move its container.
|
| Typically application tabs can be moved or recorded by
| dragging, and tabs in web pages can't; that would justify
| a different treatment. But it's because of the different
| behaviour of the tabs, not the different media
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| That's arguably the problem of the common interaction
| patterns in GUIs being non-modal. Could've been easily
| solved early on by having a convention like "holding Meta
| (Alt) makes all text on screen selectable" and sticking
| with it.
|
| At this point, it's not even a technical problem anymore -
| it's a social one. Even if somehow OS and browser vendors
| all agreed on a scheme like this, copyright industry and
| security people would scream bloody murder and prevent it
| from being implemented.
| rustystump wrote:
| This sounds perhaps a bit rude but it isnt possible to
| optimize for every possible use case someone somewhere may
| have. At the end of the day, a line has to be drawn.
| whstl wrote:
| It's not about optimizing, it's about _not_ doing
| additional work just to break the expected behavior of the
| web platform. So far there was no explanation of where
| default behavior breaks keyboard usage, for example, only
| opinions.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| It's not just about translations, either. Sometimes you want
| to document or describe to someone where something is on a
| site. "Click on FooBar, then in the popup saying <<Are you
| sure FooBar is the right Frob>> check the <<Cheesy Cheese
| Burger>> checkbox and click OK.
|
| It's much less frustrating when you can copy-paste the damned
| labels straight off the site/app, than retyping them and
| hoping you didn't misspell FooBar as FooBaz, leading the
| other person into deeper trouble rather than helping.
| Sevii wrote:
| I do not want to have to go into the dev console to copy the
| text of some random thing you think shouldn't be clickable.
| It's happened way too many times.
| csmantle wrote:
| I sometimes shop on Japanese webstores for CDs and merch. Many
| of these sites are actually where natives buy stuff, so few to
| no translations are available there. It's a routine for me to
| copy the Japanese on the nav bar to a translator, then get a
| list like "Cart <tab> Orders <tab> Account <tab> Help".
|
| Another example for buttons. Assuming I don't speak Chinese,
| how could I know what "Xia Dan " and "Fan Hui " mean without
| copy-pasting them into a translator?
| ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote:
| I think a way to resolve things like this is to have media
| features.
|
| For example: @media(prefers-user-select:
| all){ * {user-select: all;} }
|
| But that wouldn't guarantee you could select text on an
| interactive element, plenty of other things could prevent it.
|
| If it was an established known issue, then maybe people would
| do something like: :not(:lang('base-lang'))
| { * {user-select: all;} }
|
| It looks like there are plenty of extensions for this:
|
| - https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/user-select-
| all/aoh...
|
| - https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/enable-user-
| select/...
|
| - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/select-
| like-a...
|
| - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-select/
| csmantle wrote:
| Yeah that's possible for us geeks ;) But UX talks about how
| _everyone_ interacts with our site. We couldn 't just ask
| all visitors to be experts.
| ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote:
| > But UX talks about how everyone interacts
|
| It doesn't. It should, in an ideal world, but it
| definitely isn't the goal of people who design human-
| computer interfaces to allow _everyone_ who interacts
| with a computer to be happy with the way it functions.
| underlipton wrote:
| Copy-paste obviously makes things easier, but it should be
| noted that many translate tools let you draw characters these
| days, and many OCR services can read Chinese characters. But
| I agree that those are annoying extra steps.
| sib wrote:
| Not to be argumentative, but the chance of my correctly
| drawing "Xia Dan " and "Fan Hui " - especially using my
| finger on a phone screen - rounds to 0.
| Hobadee wrote:
| Real-world example I use nearly daily: Selecting the nav header
| that's the ticket number in our ticketing system. I copy-paste
| the number elsewhere.
|
| Of course there are many other bad design decisions that go
| into requiring me to do this, but it's still a real example of
| why all text should be selectable.
| n8m8 wrote:
| I almost always copy this by double clicking after the `/` in
| the URL
| fkyoureadthedoc wrote:
| Enter, stage left, ServiceNow hell urls
| grues-dinner wrote:
| Gitlab has killed this with their slide in issues. If you
| have an issue open, and you copy the address, it's just a
| huge unique ID context thing. So you have to scroll to the
| top and use the little copy link button at the top of the
| page.
| tetromino_ wrote:
| Then all those nav headers need to have a little button on
| the side to open a floating div with copy-pasteable content.
| Or, if needed - different versions of copy-pasteable content
| (as a command line for copy-pasting into the terminal, json,
| etc.)
|
| This is a standard UI convention used by all internal dev
| tools at my current company.
| lupire wrote:
| Oh don't worry, it's a tooltip, so you can see it, but not
| copy it.
| Anon1096 wrote:
| Something I absolutely loved while working at Meta was that
| basically every internal system has some kind of ticket ID,
| and more importantly, wherever it's displayed near the top of
| the page you very likely can click-to-copy it. And the click-
| to-copy gives you a rich version of the ticket ID that you
| could paste into Google Docs and have the link to the ticket
| page embedded already. Really small feature that improved the
| life of engineers a lot considering how much you're
| copy/pasting IDs around. It's the type of UX care that I
| expect ServiceNow type third party systems will never have.
| kuekacang wrote:
| Recently I've been considering simple click-to-copy button
| is a bad ux since it can destroy one's clipboard (granted,
| I'm not using clipboard manager). This might be mitigated
| with a confirmation before actually replacing the
| clipboard, but I haven't encountered such implementation.
| Maybe due to ctc more often appear in tech-related
| websites.
| mintplant wrote:
| I highly recommend getting a clipboard manager! They keep
| a (usually configurable) history of your most recent
| clipboard items and allow switching the active selection
| between them.
| p1mrx wrote:
| Instead of click-to-copy, you could do click-to-
| highlight, so that "right-click > Copy" highlights the
| text on right-click if it's not initially selected. There
| is some subtlety in the logic, because it shouldn't
| interfere when the user manually selects a substring.
|
| For a demo of click-to-highlight, install IPvFoo and use
| your mouse in the popup window. See the
| 'selectWholeAddress' function in
| https://github.com/pmarks-
| net/ipvfoo/blob/master/src/popup.j...
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| More OSs should adopt X11 paste from the primary
| selection. It can safely coexist with a regular
| clipboard.
| lupire wrote:
| My company has dedicated years of engineering time to add
| custom "copy" buttons next to text that they spent months to
| make non-selectable.
| whstl wrote:
| That's why we don't have flying cars.
| mrandish wrote:
| > text that they spent months to make non-selectable.
|
| Just curious, what was the original reason(s) to make the
| text non-selectable.
| procaryote wrote:
| > 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 and forth through tabs only to have some text
| erroneously highlight and then stay that way.
|
| No.
|
| Outlook mail for example is full of your principle, which means
| copying a mail address becomes a <<hover over the not-
| selectable mail address to pop up a contact card, scroll down
| the contact card to where the mail address shows up again, but
| is again unselectable, click the "copy to clipboard" icon>>
|
| Just make text selectable.
| sbuttgereit wrote:
| A case can be made for graphic like elements like buttons, but
| for text: treat it like text even if it's clickable.
|
| In the Web version of Outlook, there are regularly times where
| the location of an appointment is a street address. That text
| is typically clickable. But the click action doesn't correspond
| to the choice of mapping service I might want to use in any one
| instance or to the fact that I might have other actions, like
| copying the address into another email/sms/etc. Outlook
| followed your philosophy. You can't select and copy that text,
| save for going through several auxiliary clicks just to get to
| a spot where you can. It's the most annoying behavior I can
| imagine.
|
| That you think that you sitting in a meeting room talking it
| over with colleagues, or perhaps I'm a meeting in your own mind
| can assign legitimate uses and not, when something other than
| say security might be at stake, is just wrongheaded.
|
| And by the way, that address being the link that it is is great
| 60%, 70% of the time. But when it's not it's clearly a design
| mistake.
| gdwatson wrote:
| The point isn't that the developer should disable text
| selection whenever he thinks it's unnecessary, which would
| indeed be silly. It's that sometimes the user interface rules
| for navigating selectable text conflict or interfere with the
| user interface rules for navigating, say, a set of tab panes.
| In that situation, making the tab titles selectable will
| cause grief.
|
| I agree with your address example. That is user data, and it
| should be selectable.
| catapart wrote:
| I appreciate your understanding!
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| It's always bothered me that links on webpages are single click
| to open. They should require double clicking to open (like just
| about everything else on a computer) and single click should be
| used to start selecting text, like everywhere else on a
| computer.
| catapart wrote:
| You know, I've often wondered how much simpler UX would be if
| this had been the case from the start. Hard to make any
| predictions, but one can optimistically dream...
| dylan604 wrote:
| I'm guessing it would be much more disruptive for touch
| devices. It would definitely reduce the number of erroneous
| clicks when just trying to touch to scroll the screen.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| A double-click would better represent intent/consent, too,
| which the web has had long had issues with. Accidentally
| clicking things is too easy and frequent.
| harshreality wrote:
| When you run an app from the taskbar or start menu, you
| single-click on the app icon, or single-click on the Start
| menu button and then single-click on the app.
|
| Sure, icons on the desktop, or just about anything in a
| file/app explorer window, require a double-click by default,
| because the lineage of the main desktop area is just a file
| explorer window without the window decorations.
|
| I think it might be about stakeholders wanting the web to
| "feel" more native and interactive. Double-clicking to "go"
| feels too much like you're interacting with the web as if
| it's a file browser. They want it to feel more immediate?
|
| In principle I'd prefer the consistency of double-click or
| double-tap everywhere, but I'm used to adjusting based on
| context. Wouldn't double-tapping annoy everyone who primarily
| uses mobile devices?
| cestith wrote:
| You make some good points here. Even in file managers, one
| can usually highlight with a single click then use either a
| context menu or a menu at the top of the application to
| single-click on things like run, move, copy, or rename. I
| think the idea of making hyperlinks in hypertext more like
| a menu than like filesystem resources does make some sense,
| especially since the browser is an application and single-
| click within user applications has been pretty normal for a
| long time. Still, I agree it might have been better if this
| had gone the other way.
| xnx wrote:
| Why would you take the most common interaction on the web and
| change it to require double the actions with very specific
| timing?
|
| If consistency between systems is more important than
| usability, it probably makes more sense to use single click
| to open in the OS (which has been an option in Windows for 30
| years).
| Unai wrote:
| Selecting a link's text is secondary to opening it, so it
| makes sense that it takes a less direct action to do it. At
| least on Windows, just hold the "ALT" key to select without a
| click registering; not so bad, although intuition tells me
| most people don't know about it.
| Theodores wrote:
| I am sure that this would have been user tested many decades
| ago when mice had balls and three buttons. They might have
| even tested opening links on mouse over, which would be a bit
| too trigger happy.
|
| Users of just the web are not fully computer literate. The
| interface is super easy compared to actual programs where you
| need things like menus, right clicks and full hotkey support.
|
| If I think back to how my mother struggled with computers and
| how her friends were just as useless, I think they would be
| stumped with having to double click. Arthritis comes along
| too, so that generation needed all the help they could get.
| Generally it was only the advent of online shopping that
| enabled them to persevere with giving things a go.
| kps wrote:
| Double-clicking originated with the Macintosh because Jobs
| wanted a single-button mouse above all else. We're used to
| it now, but they had training exercises to teach people to
| double-click because it's undiscoverable and takes
| practice.
| MPSimmons wrote:
| Doesn't the click cause the browser to "go" on mouseUp?
| Selecting is clicking then dragging - this seems like a clear
| enough difference to me that I've never had problems. In
| fact, sometimes I will click, and think, "oh I actually don't
| want to go there" and will drag off the link and release the
| mouse button and it doesn't take me there.
| lomase wrote:
| They should require double clicking to open (like just about
| everything else on a computer)
|
| That is some Windows UI stuff, If I recall correctly in OSX
| you don't double click as much.
| gdwatson wrote:
| I agree. The closer to a traditional desktop U.I. you get, the
| jankier selecting clickable text becomes. For a simple web
| form, leaving labels selectable is no big deal and probably a
| win. But for something trying to behave like a tabbed dialog
| box, it breaks navigation left and right.
| xnx wrote:
| > It is super annoying to be clicking back and forth through
| tabs only to have some text erroneously highlight and then stay
| that way.
|
| How do you do this?
|
| > can, and usually should, prevent text selection
|
| Please don't. You're overthinking. Be a better designer by
| designing less.
| catapart wrote:
| Ah yes "design less" by "forcing selectability where it is
| not a feature by default".
|
| I swear, the platitudes are what kills me. Design and publish
| a site used by professionals and let me know what kind of
| feedback you get.
| tomrod wrote:
| As a long-time web user, some push back. I just want text. Give
| me clickable links if needed. HTMLv2 was enough for most
| information, most of the rest is eye candy.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _It is super annoying to be clicking back and forth through
| tabs only to have some text erroneously highlight and then stay
| that way._
|
| It's more annoying when your web site won't let me copy a
| package tracking number to paste into my chosen package
| tracking program. Maybe I don't want to use your system. Maybe
| the program I have is better.
|
| Just because a web dev can't think of any reasons someone would
| want to copy text doesn't mean the reasons don't exist. It just
| means the developer lacks imagination.
| 9dev wrote:
| That is not what they meant and you know it. They were
| talking about buttons labelled "OK", "Back", or "Confirm".
| Buttons that wouldn't be selectable in a native app either,
| but somehow we don't complaints about that here.
| gspencley wrote:
| I disagree. In a lot of cases text will be clickable, but will
| also contain content that you want to copy/paste into Wikipedia
| or a search engine etc. Think annotations (click on this text
| for more information) or headers/titles that are a proper noun
| that references something public... like a person's name or a
| place or a type of object or something.
|
| I don't think that's an "exception." I think that's common
| enough to make me ask: "please don't make that text not
| selectable ever."
| nahumba wrote:
| Do you know how many times i wanted to select the clickable
| link in google search result?
| kuekacang wrote:
| Back in the day I requested chrome feature "copy text" in
| addition to "copy link" on <a> context menu. Now I tried it
| it's no longer there.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| It's not? Just checked a Chrome instance I had handy, it
| has all three options in the context menu - "Copy", "Copy
| link address" and "Copy link to highlight". First one
| copies text in between <a> ... </a>, second one copies the
| href attribute, and third one copies the link to page
| you're on with that weird URL framgment-based arbitrary
| text anchor/highlight scheme.
|
| All three work on Google search results for me.
| slater wrote:
| Counterpoint to that is the bizarre "everything must be a
| link!" state of things on modern websites. Heck, even on hn -
| click on a user's name in these replies, it goes to their
| profile page. great! then on that profile page, the user's name
| is... a link back to the same page.
| sethammons wrote:
| No, text should be selectable, even when links. The amount of
| times I've accidentally highlighted instead of clicking? Maybe
| a couple? The amount of times that frustrated or confused me?
| Absolutely zero.
|
| I want to select the text of a link and copy the text of a
| link. I want to do this but I run into issues _daily_, esp. on
| mobile. PagerDuty app, I'm looking at you! Mobile seems to
| assume that you, in no world ever, could ever want to select
| text.
| grues-dinner wrote:
| Being unable to select text out of a link is absolutely
| infuriating when you want to just copy a piece of it, either
| because it's a reference number or something, or you want to
| translate it. Mobile is nearly impossible, and desktop is
| also fiddly in many cases.
|
| Often when translating it's easier to just OCR the area with
| the dictionary app, which is madness when it started as text.
| jayknight wrote:
| At least in Firefox, holding down alt while selecting let's
| you do it within a link without triggering a click event.
| tomaskafka wrote:
| Double click selects text. What to do with web app elements
| where people double click or rapidly click?
| lomase wrote:
| Double click selects text.
|
| That is what it should do.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _* note that I did not include anchor links; those are meant
| to be inline within text content and should therefore be
| selectable._
| temporallobe wrote:
| All text should be selectable (and therefore readable) to
| support accessibility tools - at least if you're app or site is
| Section 508 compliant or similar.
| spankalee wrote:
| This would be a mistake, a common one though.
|
| Instead of disallowing selection on the text with CSS, call
| `event.preventDefault()` in the click handler. This keeps a
| click that you handle from triggering the built-in text
| selection path, but you can still click-and-drag to select
| text.
| klibertp wrote:
| As long as you still offer an easy way to highlight the button
| text.
|
| Triple-click (at least in FF on Linux) highlights paragraphs or
| other block-elements contents; it should be allowed on things
| where a single-click does navigation. This would be very out of
| the way for normal users, but would allow easily and quickly
| highlighting (and copying) parts of the interface.
| 48terry wrote:
| I want to share which tabs on this tabpanel are the most
| interesting for a friend of mine to read. How would you suggest
| I get their labels?
| silverwind wrote:
| Accidential drags are can be detected an prevented in JS, which
| is imho the best solution.
| jmull wrote:
| Please don't try to second guess what should be
| selectable/copyable!
| tamimio wrote:
| Ironic, can't select your text either!
| litver wrote:
| why do you think the German girl wants you to translate her
| profile?
| oscaracso wrote:
| That was not implied by the post.
| litver wrote:
| The post implied the opposite. However, if the German girl
| writes in German, probably she wants to date in German, the
| dating platform follows her wish by making it hard to extract
| the text, translate it, and eventually waste her time.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| I don't use Bumble or any dating app, but if I saw
| someone's dating profile on a platform I was already on I
| might just read it to learn more about it. Even if the
| person is of no interest to me. Sometimes people put
| interesting details about their personal life in dating
| profiles. It's probably not going to lead to a
| relationship, but it might at least lead me to an
| interesting topic about another culture to learn about.
|
| In the case that it is in another language, I'd probably
| just use google translate if I'm not fluent enough in
| reading the language.
| Reubachi wrote:
| This is not at all the point of un-selecatable text
| development.
|
| I don't even want to ask how you came to this example.
|
| Every day this forum becomes more like reddit.
| Dilettante_ wrote:
| >Every day this forum becomes more like reddit
|
| Ooh, caught one in the wild!
| aartaka wrote:
| The post used an example of a Bumble match though. So it
| kind of makes sense one can discuss it alongside the main
| message.
| a5c11 wrote:
| Do you have a basic knowledge how those apps work? Both
| people must swipe right. If the German girl isn't
| interested in dating with non-German, she can just swipe
| left. No time wasted.
| aartaka wrote:
| This might be one interpretation, but in my particular case
| she also set English as the language she can date in. And
| then, she was visiting Armenia, so it was unlikely she
| wanted to date in German exclusively.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| this is a client issue.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I like to idly select text as I'm reading and when it doesn't
| work it's super annoying. A pox on sites that do this.
| mvanbaak wrote:
| I do exactly the same thing. thought I was the only weird one.
| freehorse wrote:
| you too?
| the_lucifer wrote:
| I triple tap my trackpad (on macOS) to highlight the
| paragraph I'm reading, then highlight the next one and so
| on.
| 9dev wrote:
| Blessed are the sites that allow symmetric selections, cursed
| those that make it wonky.
| parpfish wrote:
| same here. i use it as a kind of mental bookmark as i move down
| the page because I know that its very, very likely i'll get
| distracted by somethingand have to temporarily leave the
| article.
|
| however, this is probably a habit for a minority of users
| because it only makes sense on desktop. if you're reading on a
| mobile touchscreen-device this highlight-as-you-go tic just
| doesn't make sense
| hahn-kev wrote:
| I'll do it on my phone, but it's usually just over the area I
| was reading when I decided to look away, so it's not while
| I'm reading, only if I'm going to go somewhere else first.
| nikeee wrote:
| I don't like it when non-clickable text isn't selectable either.
| But this behavior somehow makes it feel more like an actual app
| (when used in PWAs).
| WillAdams wrote:
| The thing that kills me, is that I've had this problem with a
| stylus ever since Fall Creators Update in Windows.
|
| https://github.com/TheJoeFin/Windows10-Community/issues/17
|
| Fortunately, there is a setting for this in Firefox:
|
| >about:config change:
| dom.w3c_pointer_events.scroll_by_pen.enabled set it to False.
| qwertytyyuu wrote:
| Google lens is a god send for this
| gmuslera wrote:
| And that without counting memes and other graphic version of some
| text, some even sent by mail, or image captures or whatever of
| long and sometime critical pieces of text (i.e. certificates).
|
| It was something not specific of mobile apps, it was something
| present on internet for some decades (specially when bandwidth or
| mailbox sizes didn't added enough to be a concern to send
| something as image instead of text).
|
| But in this particular moment of history, we have AIs that can
| extract the text from an image, do the translation and maybe
| write an answer about what is there. Or be a new attack vector
| against AI agents.
| mystraline wrote:
| Ive asked this before with no answer:
|
| A browser (say, Firefox) is a "User Agent". Agents are supposed
| to act on our behalf, and in our best interests when ambiguities
| are present.
|
| So, why are OUR user agents acting on behalf of website operators
| and their admins and users, and not on our behalf?
|
| Having CSS that prevents usability shouldn't be implemented. Or
| it should be an easy toggle to turn on/off, without having to
| resort to Ublock Origin filters.
|
| Same with 'prevention of right-click'. Why is this even
| implemented?
|
| Or JavaScript also has a lot of onerous calls that are anti-user.
| I can understand why some of them are needed, but again, should
| be trivial to toggle.
|
| So, why aren't our agents acting like proper agents?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| All of those things have some niche use in an element here and
| there that allows for much better interaction in some kind of
| site.
|
| I'm honestly at a loss with unselectable text, but for example
| capturing the right mouse button is very useful for
| applications.
|
| Anyway, yes, it should be easy to turn those things off site-
| wide, like it's easy to zoom.
| zamadatix wrote:
| The one that comes to mind immediately is when you create a
| draggable element with text it's usually desirable for the
| user that click-drag moves the element rather than selects
| the text depending which part you click.
|
| Removing the attribute would probably make things worse, as
| site operators then overlay transparent elements - making
| everything even worse than when it was just styled as such.
| aartaka wrote:
| Huh, draggability is a good argument, actually.
| Reubachi wrote:
| Because browsers and their operators, like any other industry,
| over time morph to a shareholder driven mess that needs to
| constantly be integrating with feature/product X.
|
| If the same operator also controls the entire adspace in the
| web, and has significant impact/input on other connected media
| devices beyond webbrowsers, what incentive do they have to
| empower users to "ignore" content, be it ads, ai slop, bad UI?
| Ther's literally none, the number still goes up revenue wise.
|
| Unavoidable content delivery attached to revenue generation is
| the present and the future and the only solution is disonnected
| services/products that aren't tied to dollars.
| aartaka wrote:
| Still, it's sad we're in this timeline.
| aartaka wrote:
| I know this is a bad answer, but. Web is a multi-stakeholder
| environment. Publishers and shitty content farms are
| stakeholders too. So they find a use for selection toggling in
| their dirty business and push for it.
|
| But in case of text selection toggling, it has likely appeared
| because of the need to make interactive elements non-
| inadvertently-selectable. Because complex UIs.
| 3036e4 wrote:
| 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.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| 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).
| aartaka wrote:
| That's a fun idea, though I realize we're too deep in
| backwards-looking design to ever fix that.
| setgree wrote:
| 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/
| stfp wrote:
| Maybe but it happens in many many other contexts. Especially
| apps - right now for example in Hipcamp I cannot copy the
| detailed instructions for my trip. In Airbnb I can copy the
| entire "house rules" doc but not just an arbitrary paragraph or
| sentence.
| ertgbnm wrote:
| This may be the "reason" that they use but I doubt they have
| done any testing to show that it provides any level of
| protection and just makes their app less useable. Sounding like
| a good reason doesn't make it a good reason.
| Jotalea wrote:
| This is the exact definition of hypocrisy. Though it might be
| intentional and as a way of making fun of what OP is talking
| about.
|
| Now to my actual response to this: there is a new official tool
| for Android devices that allows doing OCR, text selection
| (including copying), translation and even search, as well as
| reverse image search and music detection. I'm talking about the
| Circle to Search feature; it is a great thing wherever you look
| at it from. Especially for this exact situation.
|
| I wish there were a similar tool for desktop OSes (Linux,
| windows, macOS) that is as easy to use as CTS.
| ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote:
| While, IMO, it shouldn't be on the general outline of a document,
| user-select has good usability improvements when used correctly.
| It allows for pure CSS implementations of focus driven animations
| and many, many other things.
| nixosbestos wrote:
| Airbnb hosts that put textual descriptions with the address, and
| it only lets you copy the full text. Google Messages doesn't let
| you select OTP out of the text, you literally have to copy paste
| it to Gmail, then copy the code out.
|
| Android has a nice feature though, you can go into multitask view
| and hit "Select" and select any visible text for copy. Except
| that WHATSAPP BLOCKS IT FOR BUSINESS ACCOUNTS. You know, the kind
| that are likely in a local language, making it impossible to
| translate.
|
| I hate tech so much, it makes me irrationally angry. So much busy
| work to make users' lives markedly WORSE.
| encom wrote:
| >I hate tech so much, it makes me irrationally angry.
|
| One moment you're rage-posting on HackerNews, next you're
| authoring a manifesto on a typewriter in a remote cabin in the
| woods.
| aartaka wrote:
| Life goals.
| aartaka wrote:
| Yeah, all these extra steps for something that should've been
| native in the first place. Ugh.
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| Same with many "business" websites such as Outlook and Teams.
| "Inspect element" to copy innerText is already in muscle memory.
| cool-RR wrote:
| Dating apps are not meant to be efficient, definitely not to
| someone with a developer mindset.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Yeah, you're not supposed to switch to a different app. They
| want you to stay in the app and engage.
| aartaka wrote:
| And that sucks.
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| For websites and webpages, at least on desktop, you can usually
| do something about it.
|
| But for apps... good luck finding a solution.
|
| At least Twitter, which I use the most, lets you select text.
|
| The one I hate the most is Spotify. Copying the name of a song or
| an artist is something I do regularly, yet there's no way to do
| it in the app.
| stahorn wrote:
| Like that one time the Spotify algorithm found a cool band.
| Only problem was that they were Chinese. If the name of a band
| uses some language that's based on some form of the latin
| alphabet, I can always type something similar to the name and a
| search engine will find it for me. With Chinese, no chance at
| all.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| This also affects navigating the webpage with a cursor (F7 in
| firefox).
| wishinghand wrote:
| Instagram is the same way if a link is dropped into the comments.
| Infuriating.
| Skullfurious wrote:
| > I'm lonely. Like everyone-ish else. Naturally, I'm on Bumble.
|
| ... alright I see...
|
| >"(Because Tinder is a rape-friendly lure trap.)"
|
| I just sat down. Who the hell starts a conversation off like
| this?
| dinkleberg wrote:
| I was surprised to see nobody else commenting on that. A wild
| start to a post.
| aartaka wrote:
| I do. Because that's the truth and a part of my life choices.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| I have same gripe, but for some apps that provide "non-copyable
| images" as feature
|
| you're saying that you load images, even store in my cache - but
| simply disallow same UX you allow on other images? wtf
| qwery wrote:
| I too am a selector of text. I select text for many valid
| reasons. I have never selected text for an invalid reason.
|
| A lot of websites include (anti-)features that make it extremely
| difficult for me to read and this severely limits the amount that
| I interact with the site. Features that hijack text selection in
| some way or preventing it entirely for whatever misguided reason
| are some of the worst offenders. Yes, I realise that not
| everything is _for me_ -- I am getting that message loud and
| clear.
|
| Preventing text selection is one of the most egregious and
| hostile ways to make your software unfriendly, but those
| insidious "share this quote" popout drawers are slowly fading in
| right behind it[0], hyperactively reflowing the layout and
| appending random snippets of selected text to the URL.
|
| Reading is the most basic, most fundamental way to interact with
| the web. It's fundamental to using software in general. It seems
| to be necessary to point out that _' reading'_ and _' looking
| at'_ are not interchangeable terms. Frankly, _designers_ should
| know better.
|
| [0] Except they're not, because you can't select the text,
| obviously.
| chrisBob wrote:
| This is true in so many places. Once a week I get mad at Swagger
| for this. Why can't I select the endpoint URL?!? Why do I have to
| retype it when I am trying to discuss it with our backend guy?
| numbers wrote:
| I love posts like this, they reiterate the fact that people
| notice many different things about their experience interacting
| with your website, app, or product.
|
| I often find myself having the tiniest of complaints about using
| something but never get around to writing about it.
| aartaka wrote:
| Yeah, that's a really valuable thing to have an affirmation for
| one's feelings and experiences. Especially when worded well.
| jiehong wrote:
| It's especially aggravating in mobiles apps, like on iOS such as:
|
| - can't select app reviews text (for translation for example)
|
| - WhatsApp text bubbles don't let you select text inside at all
|
| - WeChat: exact same
|
| Overall, it's also very annoying when apps just don't give you
| the standard OS options for a field. Like WhatsApp or WeChat does
| not give you access to the normal contextual menu at all, so no
| "translate" for your messages outside of what is or isn't
| supported by the app itself, etc.
| kevincox wrote:
| Yeah, all messaging apps seem to have decided that you
| shouldn't be able to select part of the message. The only
| option is to copy exactly one message. Not multiple messages,
| not that one word you want to look up from one message.
|
| I don't know why this is standard but it is very annoying.
| aendruk wrote:
| The most recent offender I've encountered is some SaaS called
| Termly which barfs out full terms of service, privacy policies,
| etc. with this human-hostile "feature". Good luck actually using
| the contact information they contain.
|
| I added this uBO filter just yesterday:
| app.termly.io##*:style(user-select: unset !important;)
|
| Of course all the links are `target=_blank` too. I really don't
| understand the mentality of whomever makes these.
| aartaka wrote:
| Links with target=_blank are annoying too. I want my click to
| open in this tab, and ctrl+click to open in new one. Give me mu
| fucking choice.
| froddd wrote:
| Interesting choice of example. I would probably have gone with
| the PayPal or eBay apps, which (on iOS at least) still refuse to
| let you select the text from the address you have to send the
| item you've sold to.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Yeah if someone has their bumble bio in a language you don't
| understand, then well... let's say you're not exactly their
| target audience.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| This is why I prefer web apps over native apps. Web defaults to
| selectable text and text readable by extensions. I can long press
| on almost any word and pick "Define" if I don't understand a word
| (or right click on desktop). Native defaults to unselectable text
| and no extensions.
|
| It's also why I hate Flutter on web. They render text to canvas,
| suddenly nothing is selectable and so accessibility and
| definition/translation options don't work.
|
| See https://earth.gooogle.com Click on a city. An info box pops
| up. Nothing is selectable. Of course a poorly designed HTML info
| box could do that too but the designer has to go out of their way
| to make it bad whereas with Flutter (and native in general) the
| default is bad.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Good point.
|
| Everyone in the comments is talking about websites, but TFA is
| talking about the iOS Bumble app where it's trivial to
| unintentionally create unselectable text. e.g. SwiftUI Text
| components are unselectable by default.
|
| Also, in an iOS app, it's common to decide that interacting
| with some text should do something like navigate.
|
| IIRC tapping a comment in iOS Apollo (defunct Reddit client)
| would collapse the comment. If you wanted to make a text
| selection, the Apollo app developer created a specific text-
| selection-mode for that. That's how anti-user the norms are on
| native apps compared to the web.
|
| Often, disabling selection on the web comes from trying to port
| native app norms to a web app.
| yowmamasita wrote:
| After I read the article, I went back to HN to search for
| flutter - the worst thing ever created for web accessibility.
| Glad to see this comment.
| larodi wrote:
| Dude is right, most of this non-selectable web can be served as
| images from a back-end. We have both the server power and network
| to do it, perhaps is going to be in many cases be faster than all
| the React/Angular slop on top of simple UIs in 2025.
| aartaka wrote:
| Accessibility though...
| fainpul wrote:
| Any plain old TextView on iOS and Android has text selection
| disabled by default. As a developer, you need to make it
| selectable explicitly. Apparently Apple and Google want it that
| way.
| albert_e wrote:
| Microsoft Copilot for PowerPoint generates decent / passable
| abstract designs for slides ... but you can't then edit the
| design elements at all. The appear neither on the slide nor on
| the underlying master slide.
| iefbr14 wrote:
| On my system I use a little script coupled to a key that lets you
| select a graphical area with text in it and it converts it into
| real text that is placed in the clipboard:
|
| #!/usr/bin/bash
|
| maim -us | tesseract --dpi 145 -l eng - - | xsel -bi
|
| [[ "$(xsel -ob)" ]] || (notify-send "No text found"; ohno)
|
| You wil have to install maim, tesseract and xsel for it to work.
|
| Edit: you can leave out the ohno which is just an audible alarm
| on my system
| zahlman wrote:
| I've heard of tesseract and xsel, but what is maim? Seems a bit
| hard to look up given that it's also a common word.
| fread2281 wrote:
| https://github.com/naelstrof/maim/ it's a screenshot utility
| suikun wrote:
| "maim (make image) takes screenshots of your desktop."
| https://github.com/naelstrof/maim
|
| Found it by searching through the official arch linux
| packages: https://archlinux.org/packages/ Could also have
| tried AUR if hadn't found it there :)
| remus wrote:
| The instagram app is infuriating for this. What possible reason
| is there for not allowing the user to select text in captions? I
| just want to put it into google translate so I can get a non-
| garbage translation of foreign language captions, or look
| something up on wikipedia, or paste a name in to my contacts,
| or...
|
| So the workaround on android is to long press the bottom bar,
| send the screen off to gemini to OCR it, it'll recognise it's
| foreign language and then translate it for you. What a complete
| waste of time! You've got these remarkable LLM capabilities at
| your fingertips, and we're forced to burn energy working around
| these asinine restrictions for something as simple, as universal
| and as well understood as copying text.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| I take screenshots of posts on X and have ChatGPT provide
| critical commentary. It has worked out really well. I am sure
| translation will work well too.
| aartaka wrote:
| That's a terrible use of technology. You can just read that. No
| need for a forest-burning slop machine there.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| It's actually searching google and referencing newspaper
| articles. That's very helpful to me and saves me a lot of
| time.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| Cigna webpage used to show the submission id in selectable text
| at the end of claim submission. Then they did a dark pattern and
| now the submission id is no longer selectable - god forbid the
| convenience of being able to copy/paste it in my invoice
| filename. It is like these companies are in a race to see who can
| embrace the cuntiest practices.
| dejongh wrote:
| I don't know the bumble app, but it really annoys me that I
| cannot copy text in reddit and facebook (I am forced to use this
| app by my daughters hobby). If you dev a mobile app - make sure
| users can select and copy text!
| cosmojg wrote:
| I must admit, one of my favorite recent-ish Android[1] features
| is that all text is made selectable in the app switcher using on-
| device OCR. Regardless of the app[2], you can just swipe up and
| start selecting text.
|
| [1] ...at least on the Google Pixel.
|
| [2] ...unless it's a banking app and it blocks permissions for
| screenshots and similar things.
| pastage wrote:
| OCR seems to be working on recent Android versions not only
| Google hardware.
| jayknight wrote:
| Yep, on my S22, I long-press home and can then circle or
| swipe text to copy, or translate if needed.
| jadbox wrote:
| This is my favorite feature on Android next to sideloading.
| svobodovic wrote:
| Yes, I just wanted to reply the same thing. It's a great
| feature for these use cases (albeit, I too would like to see
| more universal or friendlier approach to text-selectability in
| apps).
|
| Additionally, the text copied in this manner can be instantly
| opened in Clipboard editor (at least on Google Pixel), and when
| selected again there, it offers even more contextual options,
| such as translate in one of your installed apps (like Deepl).
|
| That way, you can translate the "non-selectable" text in a very
| few short taps.
| bapak wrote:
| Same for iOS, just not immediately possible. In iOS the new
| screenshot UI makes it a little easier, before it would need at
| least 3 taps and a couple of seconds to make it selectable
| al_borland wrote:
| The OCR in iOS and macOS has been a game changer for me. It
| seems like such a small thing, but it changes how I work in a
| big way.
|
| If someone is sharing a webpage, I don't need to ask for the
| link anymore. Just take a screenshot and click it. I do this
| multiple times every day.
| digianarchist wrote:
| On iOS you can create a shortcut to push a screenshot through
| the built in OCR and copy to clipboard. You need to crop
| beforehand if you don't want all the text on the screen.
|
| https://imgur.com/a/NctIGsK
| cryptonector wrote:
| On recent iOS versions it just happens. You try to click on
| an image in the browser to save it and whoops! you're
| clicking on text in the image that iOS already OCRed for you.
| And the Photos app will let you search for OCRed text, and it
| OCRs _all_ the text without you having to lift a finger.
| abustamam wrote:
| > unless it's a banking app and it blocks permissions for
| screenshots and similar things.
|
| Yeah those can fuck all the way off. I'm lucky I have two
| phones so I can take a photo of my screen and use it for OCR or
| whatever, but it's ridiculous I have to do that.
|
| I understand that for security purposes they don't want to let
| you take a screenshot in case of a man in the middle or
| whatever, but let me risk it. Warn me or something, but let me
| do it.
| andai wrote:
| This includes not just images, but text which is part of the
| app's UI, and not otherwise selectable, right? If so, that is
| pretty funny. Running advanced machine learning models to
| extract the data that we already have (but won't let the user
| access normally).
| averageRoyalty wrote:
| > unless it's a banking app and it blocks permissions for
| screenshots and similar things.
|
| Can you not disable this? I just tested on stock iOS, and I can
| screenshot all of my banking apps.
| dogman1050 wrote:
| This is why I use webpages instead of apps if possible. Firefox
| reader mode usually defeats not being able to select and copy.
| chaboud wrote:
| Making the text on the page not selectable is _chef's kiss_ good.
| aartaka wrote:
| Glad you noticed!
| zwnow wrote:
| Im aware about the article but for the small German Bumble
| example: Do not bother with bios. 99% of them are unfunny copy
| and paste bs because they cant be bothered to put in actual
| effort, their like inbox is filled up after half a day anyway.
| aartaka wrote:
| There's always hope.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Screenshot, paste in LLM, select text is my workaround.
| aartaka wrote:
| You can use OS-native ways for that, no need to burn forest
| just for text OCR.
| j1elo wrote:
| Add this as a favorite/bookmark:
| javascript:(function(){document.styleSheets[0].insertRule("* {
| user-select:text !important }", 1);})();
|
| Extra treat: this other one allows to copy text and open the
| context menu in pages that are written by rats who disable it:
| javascript:['copy','cut','paste','contextmenu','selectstart'].for
| Each(e=>document.addEventListener(e,e=>e.stopImmediatePropagation
| (),true));
| cptskippy wrote:
| The problem is so prevalent that Microsoft has a PowerToy
| specifically for OCRing pixels.
|
| https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/text-ext...
| wkjagt wrote:
| I wonder how doable it is to fork a browser and just remove
| functionality from it, like for example making "user-select"
| unsupported. Or whatever it is that prevents me from pasting my
| password in a log in form.
| ZoomStop wrote:
| Easier to just use a userscript plugin and have it override
| those settings on every page
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| I have a habit of selecting and highlighting text on computer
| screens, while reading. I have no issues tracking lines usually,
| but somehow I still select and highlight. Maybe it is just easier
| to track lines this way. When I see some web page, that prevents
| this, then that website gets a -50 reputation score out of 100 in
| my book. So if the site is perfect in every other way (almost no
| site is) then -50 still makes it pretty terrible. If additionally
| it would actually be useful in other ways to highlight and copy
| text on a site, then I get really annoyed by web non-sense like
| that. Similarly I get annoyed, if every pixel is some clickable
| action trigger.
|
| This is not what hypertext has been created for. Stop making the
| web into a cesspit of bad accessibility.
| JayShower wrote:
| I also have the habit and am not sure why. I just find myself
| double-clicking and highlighting whatever I'm reading. Someone
| noticed me doing it once and asked if I had a tic.
| marklubi wrote:
| Similar story for me. With my work, I get pulled in a lot of
| different directions at seemingly random times. This helps me
| quickly resume what I was doing.
| mastercheif wrote:
| I was worried I was the only one who did this. Glad to know I'm
| not alone out there.
| will_pseudonym wrote:
| > I have a habit of selecting and highlighting text on computer
| screens, while reading.
|
| "There are dozens of us!"
| muxator wrote:
| Hi, fellow compulsive selectors! Thanks, I am no longer
| feeling alone!
| jonnat wrote:
| The hardest part is to remember not to do it when sharing
| screens...
| viridian wrote:
| I still do it, for emphasis. Never had anyone complain
| thus far.
| Hard_Space wrote:
| Glad also to feel justified at last!
| edbaskerville wrote:
| Me too!
|
| Developed this habit as a kid on a Mac IIcx in 1992. Hard
| to break.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Me three, there are many dozens of us!
|
| Compulsive selecting while reading, and hitting CTRL+S
| every couple seconds while editing documents, are the two
| "weird" habits I couldn't kick for decades now. Most of the
| time, I'm not even conscious I'm doing those things; I only
| notice when the text isn't selectable or the program pops
| up a modal in response to CTRL+S.
| lxgr wrote:
| I vaguely remember hearing an anecdote about how UX
| researchers love people that read like that (or at least just
| use their cursor to keep their position while
| reading/navigating): Camera-free eye tracking telemetry :)
| calmbonsai wrote:
| Some of us were even actively selecting and highlighting that
| text as we were reading it! ;)
| aartaka wrote:
| Hell yeah, I did that!
| mrbonner wrote:
| Plus knocking on the desk when I finish a sentence, too.
| brongondwana wrote:
| Join the club, we have compulsive mouse habits.
|
| (am a member of this select club)
| rozap wrote:
| me too!
| keyworkorange wrote:
| Seriously! Same! Relieved to know I'm not alone in having
| this quirk.
| wulfstan wrote:
| Such a relief! But it drives my wife completely crazy.
| brulard wrote:
| Same here. And so many pages have stupid popups whenever you
| select something and more often then not you are just
| triggering weird actions that you don't really want.
| YeahThisIsMe wrote:
| That's why NoScript is an absolute necessity to me, even if
| it takes some time and experience to figure out which script
| URLs to whitelist to get a usable site.
| AlfredBarnes wrote:
| One of my ticks is repeatedly highlighting text over and over.
| I blame years of drone splitting.
|
| It also helps me focus on reading.
| lupire wrote:
| What is drone splitting?
| aiiane wrote:
| Someone played EVE Online.
| umpalumpaaa wrote:
| Or StarCraft...
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/11tb1gp/how_c
| ome...
| lordgilman wrote:
| In StarCraft you can give individual orders to your initial
| group of workers (drones) instead of giving them one big
| group order. It takes only a few seconds for your drones to
| move to the resources so you only have a few seconds to
| click and give multiple orders.
| topspin wrote:
| Same habit. Can't remember when it started. I've caused myself
| problems doing this.
|
| Some PDF datasheets somehow prevent selection. Deeply annoying.
| You just know there is some fool calling that shot, thinking
| their protecting something precious.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| With PDF you can have vector text that isn't detected as
| text. Some desktop publishing tools layout each glyph
| individually and the reader may not reconstruct the
| underlying sentence geometry to base selections on. You can
| also have scanned bitmap pages with no underlying OCR text
| layer for the reader to make selections from. PDF text
| detection and selection is a black art.
| Shorel wrote:
| I started when using Windows 95.
|
| Selecting stuff allowed me to see if the computer had frozen
| and required a reboot.
|
| Those where the wild times ;/
| whatamidoingyo wrote:
| Same here. I was doing it while reading your comment. I imagine
| there are dozens of other people doing it as well, haha.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| The modern web has been dissuading me of this habit. I get
| unreasonably angry when I select some text, only for an
| engagement pop up to appear, demanding that my selected text be
| shared with the world via social media. No, how I interact with
| the page is a private affair.
| tevli wrote:
| substack is the biggest culprit in this.
| hatthew wrote:
| relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/1271/
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Oh my ... Why didn't I know that one earlier? This stuff is
| also what I do! Like estimating until where to select, to
| select half of the text, given that the last line ends at 1/3
| of the line width ...
| kilroy123 wrote:
| I literally selected your comment as I read it. I do the same.
| a2dam wrote:
| Same here, I even have a fun mini game in my head where I try
| to make the selection box beginning line directly up with the
| end on the row below.
| dutzi wrote:
| I love you
| fletchowns wrote:
| I think my text highlighting habit started in the late 90s when
| the prominent N64 website (what was the name of it??) would
| have text intentionally "hidden" on the page in the same color
| as the background, so you had to highlight to see it.
| 1bpp wrote:
| You might mean N64.com, which later evolved into IGN64/IGN
| narag wrote:
| Well, yet another compulsive selector here, but:
|
| _Similarly I get annoyed, if every pixel is some clickable
| action trigger._
|
| This is the worst. It permeates all kind of GUIs. Windows has
| this mini preview windows that pop up when you're hovering over
| the apps in the taskbar. Also if you accidentally hover _over
| them_ , all the windows are minimized except the one previewed.
|
| Microsoft has systematically terminated _every single way_ of
| disabling this idiocy.
|
| Using one Windows inside another (vbox) at work is causing me
| PTSD. I'm no proud of it, but I think I'd use physical violence
| if I could confront the culprit.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _Using one Windows inside another (vbox) at work is causing
| me PTSD._
|
| At one time in my life, I might have called you out for bad-
| taste hyperbole... but no, this kind of thing is _genuinely_
| traumatising. And that 's ridiculous: what has the world come
| to, that _desktop operating systems_ are giving people PTSD!?
| lomase wrote:
| Also if you accidentally hover over them, all the windows are
| minimized except the one previewed.
|
| This does not happen on my windows machines, must be
| something configurable, I would hate it.
| system7rocks wrote:
| I am not alone in this universe???
| bdangubic wrote:
| I selected and highlighted your comment dozen times while I was
| reading it :)
| empyrrhicist wrote:
| I'm doing it _right now_.
| cryptonector wrote:
| If you do it constantly then it's OCD :) but you don't need OCD
| for clicking and highlighting text to be a legitimate thing
| that readers do. So 100% this kind of website you're talking
| about is utter crap. -50 is not enough.
| aartaka wrote:
| Totally agreed. I'm often compulsively highlighting things too,
| and I often get caught in clickable areas. We need proper text
| content, not this.
| crazygringo wrote:
| What are example web pages that prevent this for body text? I
| feel like I've never come across it before, expect TFA which is
| making a point...
|
| I also can't recall ever coming across a clickable action
| trigger on every word. Just links that might have some popup
| action. And I use opt+click to select things within regular
| links.
|
| I'm genuinely curious because it seems like lots of people are
| agreeing, and this is not a problem I've ever encountered
| before. Are there common sites known for this that I just
| haven't visited?
| __icarus__ wrote:
| substack and some modern ebook apps such as kindle and Wechat
| books. When you select a popup appears for highlight, leave a
| comment, or share.
| aaaronic wrote:
| Ditto!
| codazoda wrote:
| Hey Artyom. :P
| aartaka wrote:
| Hey Joel, glad to see you here!
| quitit wrote:
| For websites there are extensions specifically to address this
| and other terrible behaviours, one such example is Stop The
| Madness. https://underpassapp.com/StopTheMadness/
|
| It includes a webpage demonstrating the typical behaviours you
| can correct:
|
| https://underpassapp.com/StopTheMadness/test.html
|
| (The screen capture function also does auto OCR for those pesky
| apps, even lets you translate it right then and there - no need
| to go into the photos app as mentioned by the author.)
| thimabi wrote:
| Besides disabling copying, another annoying practice is when
| websites hijack the clipboard to add copyright info to copied
| text fragments.
|
| I can barely understand showing a pop-up to request source
| attribution when copying content online.
|
| However, actively interfering with things people copy is a big
| no-no to me. It creates a usability problem where there was none,
| and probably does little to discourage plagiarism.
| skydhash wrote:
| I think iBook has that "feature" and that made me, along the
| ever present store, abandon it as a reader. And it's a nice
| reader.
| throw7 wrote:
| It's not only text. Images and videos are obfuscated to make
| copy/downloading harder.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| One of many examples of the way that UI has backslid in modern
| times.
|
| I swear, sometimes I think we peaked sometime in the TN3270 days
| aartaka wrote:
| Did the old GUI frameworks allow selecting text though? I had
| another commenter explain that selectable text is a totally
| different type of widget than a regular non-selectable text,
| and a much more involved/heavyweight too!
| jama211 wrote:
| Just a small note, the ocr stuff they needed to do to get the
| translation is a step further than needed, the screenshot could
| just be uploaded directly into the google translate app.
| tcoppola wrote:
| Well, sure, but that's not too efficient. A screenshot is a
| couple MB at least while the text is a KB or so.
| indymike wrote:
| I get a kick out of it when a product manager comes suggesting we
| diable text selection. "oh, you want to disable the single most
| usable and powerful interoperability feature in our product?"
|
| "Yeah. Do we really want people leaving our app with their data?"
|
| By leaving, do you mean kicking it off the phone or switching to
| another app and getting something done?
|
| "Oh, yeah, they are just getting something done. But not in our
| app. So they are leaving."
|
| I think the problem here is not becoming the Hotel California.
| einpoklum wrote:
| I can't even check out any time I like because of pop-up
| notifications :-(
| indymike wrote:
| They stil got the never leave part right.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Disabling right click was one of the most common requests from
| site owners to webmasters back around 2000. They mostly wanted
| to prevent "Save as..." on the images, but copying article text
| out was also part of it.
| somat wrote:
| I have never seen a "native" toolkit let you select arbitrary
| text, They should, I think it is the better interface paradigm.
| but the web is a distinct outlier here.
| 867-5309 wrote:
| > _title_
|
| > 9 words in: text in a .png
| iLemming wrote:
| One of the biggest wins in my life that Emacs has granted me is
| the principle of never sacrificing plain text liberties. I
| could've probably achieved similar results using other tools, but
| the way Emacs puts you into that mindset is just on another level
| of awesome.
|
| Today, I can extract text from any tab in my browser to appear in
| an Emacs buffer. And it specifically "extracts" the text, it's
| not operating on the URL - meaning that I don't have to deal with
| auth, cookies, and other things, it just grabs the .outerHTML of
| an already rendered page - takes me not even a second. I can do
| whatever I want with that text - read it with far better
| readability features, feed it to an LLM, export into formats,
| grab some parts for my notes, etc.
|
| I can extract transcript from a YT video URL with a press of a
| key.
|
| Heck, I can even extract text from an image in my clipboard.
| That's what I do almost every day. My colleague would be showing
| me stuff through Zoom, I'd run Flameshot to grab a specific
| portion of the screen, and then run my elisp function - it OCRs
| the image and puts the results into a buffer.
|
| My advice to you folks: do not ever surrender to the status quo;
| keep the hacker's mindset; hack your way around computers. You
| have a finite amount of attention tokens, do not waste them
| getting angry at the upsetting design of web pages; extract what
| you need like a boss and move on.
| bluedino wrote:
| And then I run into "I don't want to select text" when I'm
| editing an image that has text/numbers in it. I'm just trying to
| highlight something or mark the document up.
| mymacbook wrote:
| I thought I was alone, until today!!
|
| This is what drives crazy when browsing google search results on
| Mobile Safari!
| jeffwask wrote:
| The way websites and apps have screwed with copy/paste over the
| last decade is one of my largest tech pet peeves and I have used
| a number of extensions to work around this non-sense.
| CM30 wrote:
| Let's not forget the frustrations of an online system disabling
| the ability to select anything other than 'all' the text in a
| paragraph/text area/whatever.
|
| So many times I've needed simplify the data provided by an embed
| code or share link for some reason (usually a third party
| integration or API development), only to have found the site
| forcefully making me select way more than I ever needed to. It
| doesn't really change anything in the long run (since you can
| just copy it into any other text editor and get what you need
| there), but it's still an annoying extra step that shouldn't be
| needed nonetheless.
| martin-adams wrote:
| The problem I face with building web apps where the elements are
| draggable or clickable, is that the browser also selects the
| text. The easiest solution is to disable text selection.
|
| But I'd love to know if there's a better solution to keep text
| selection somehow.
| smelendez wrote:
| This is probably the issue in apps like Bumble--trying to keep
| the interface ultra simple and clean. Unfortunately the makers
| of apps like this are thinking in large numbers and not really
| considering issues like translation.
|
| It may also be to make it harder for users to slip in copy-and-
| paste references to material on other sites for spam or other
| purposes. Occasionally I'll see someone list an Instagram or
| Snapchat ID on a dating site, and they're often doing something
| at least semi-dodgy.
|
| Another issue might be reducing profile plagiarism.
| sheerun wrote:
| Another website where you can't post as yourself. What is the
| point
| Aldipower wrote:
| Having an example of too much of selectable text. When I copy a
| YouTube video title and paste it somewhere else suddenly the
| language code of the text appears in front of the pasted text
| line. That is also really annoying.
| sheerun wrote:
| Are you machine?
| panzi wrote:
| On the web you can most of the time select text. You can at least
| inspect the element and copy the text that way. But in GUI
| programs very often you cant. There are these labels that cant be
| selected or copied. Especially frustrating for error messages. In
| e.g. KDE you actually can copy error messages! So that is great!
| I was told that under Windows you _can_ do it simply by pressing
| Ctrl+C when the message box is open. That isn 't very
| discoverable. Anyone know if that was always possible in Windows?
| Last I used was XP.
|
| Also reminds me of that Jonathan Blow video where he fights the
| Visual Studio debugger and can't copy a value.
| justinator wrote:
| Screenshot, Copy, New from Clipboard in Preview.app, Tools ->
| Text Selection, select your text.
|
| Hack the planet.
| exoverito wrote:
| Awesome! Much appreciated bro.
|
| And yet...
| https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EAsh47yWwAAxU1m?format=jpg&name=...
| pmarreck wrote:
| Addendum: Just let me save images.
|
| (I can't stand IG for this reason.)
| repple wrote:
| iOS has been so bad at it; selecting text to copy and then find
| out the last one or two characters are missing :/
| drnick1 wrote:
| Copy/paste restrictions are annoying and don't protect the
| content in any way as you can always get the text from the HTML
| source.
|
| Lazy people can also just snap a screenshot and give it to an
| LLM.
| janj wrote:
| I can't believe GitHub broke copy/paste for files in a pull
| request. Now when I highlight a few rows in a file they are
| unselected and a feedback comment box appears. That used to
| happen when you click and dragged file line numbers. Breaking
| find/replace in this way is unacceptable and surprising coming
| from GitHub.
| a-dub wrote:
| even more frustrating is when the text is too small, but the ui
| doesn't allow me to zoom.
|
| sure there's the accessibility zoom, but it's somewhat clunky.
| zoom and clipboard should be consistent, non-optional and handled
| by the os ui layer.
| benbristow wrote:
| For Tinder if you're on desktop you can use the website
| (tinder.com), don't believe that blocks selecting text.
| byronic wrote:
| Trying to select the text on the page and it took me a few
| seconds to get the joke
| miladyincontrol wrote:
| I know I'm preaching to the choir but it feels like such a fool's
| errand to do so.
|
| It doesnt stop any of the behaviours they think they are while
| making their site all the worse for actual users. All it does is
| give the author the illusion that its protecting their site's
| content while making the experience noticeably worse.
| schappim wrote:
| I made/use this to get around the inability to select text:
| https://github.com/schappim/macOCR
| feelamee wrote:
| fun fact: I cant select text in this website from phone.. I am
| use firefox nightly. Selection only works on .txt version of site
| pbasista wrote:
| When I encounter a website which does not allow text selection,
| copying or right click, I usually enable the "Absolute Enable
| Right Click & Copy" browser extension which removes all of these
| restrictions.
|
| Such restrictive practices, in my opinion, not only make the
| website less useful to the user. It also intentionally alienates
| its users.
|
| I cannot think of a rational reason to do something like that.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| > It also intentionally alienates its users.
|
| Only the tinkerer-type techies. Most people don't understand
| why right click doesn't work, they don't have a mental model of
| what is responsible for what and things are often broken in
| mysterious ways anyway. If users are not alienated by how the
| web looks without an adblocker (try it once on some mainstream
| news site or blog or recipe site!), they surely won't be
| alienated by unselectable text.
|
| The rational reason is to avoid getting their content "stolen",
| or having the user leave the site to do something else with the
| saved content.
| trizoza wrote:
| Yes, Goodreads are next in line to fix this. Whenever I want to
| copy the name of the book from my read list, so I can purchase
| it, I can't copy??? Wasn't Goodreads made by book lovers for book
| lovers? Now it seems like a monopoly app that reached the network
| effects and DOES NOT CARE anymore.
| mattvr wrote:
| Many mobile apps encounter this because React Native still
| doesn't have a good solution for selectable text [0].
|
| Workarounds exist [1], but aren't great for text that spans
| multiple lines and styles.
|
| [0] https://github.com/facebook/react-native/issues/13938
|
| [1] https://github.com/bluesky-social/react-native-uitextview
| qwertox wrote:
| A very similar issue is the lack of support for mmb "open tab in
| new background tab"-click in pages like Twitter. You have to
| click on the post and open the page for it, instead of deferring
| the use of that page to later (when more got opened in the
| background, starting from the main feed).
|
| Or you can't just mmb-click the "Trending in..." clickable to
| open a trend in a background tab.
| lwhi wrote:
| Android can do this with a single gesture.
|
| Just sayin' ...
| cprayingmantis wrote:
| On my iPhone I end up using a screenshot to select text via OCR
| and copy it from there. It's frustrating when apps like Facebook
| won't let you copy and paste stuff into Google Maps from a
| birthday invite.
| hbn wrote:
| I've also found you can just shoot the screenshot into ChatGPT
| and either ask it to translate or ask questions about it in
| your native language.
|
| LLMs are arguably better translators since they're kinda built
| to concern themselves with context, or if it's missing you can
| just fill it in yourself with the prompt.
|
| (Probably varies per language, I've had good success with going
| both directions with English and Spanish)
| W0lfEagle wrote:
| 100% agree and living in a foreign country I have found myself
| completely reliant on the "circle to search" feature on Android
| as I'm far too often blocked by text protection and the instant
| translate is very handy. This has already been mentioned in other
| comments and I appreciate it is a circumvention of the problem.
| Just let me circle to search though also (sometimes it is
| blocked).
| swiftcoder wrote:
| So the joke here is that the text on the webpage is not
| selectable, right?
| rotis wrote:
| Reminds me of one of the stupidest hacks I discovered (In my
| mind). In one of my previous companies we had many similar Lotus
| Notes databases and one of them didn't allow to copy text from
| it. You could paste, I'm sure. You could select the text. But not
| copy. Turns out you could DRAG the selected text to other window.
| This copied the text over. So being able to highlight a text may
| mean you can indeed copy it ;)
| rammer wrote:
| Bumble nor any dating app like that doesn't want users copying
| and pasting the profile info externally as a matter of business.
|
| Multiple reasons Could be because they don't want a record of
| that elsewhere. Like teens sharing with friends.
|
| Don't want people copy pasting text to use on other profiles. So
| using someone else's account profile story.
|
| The
| tobinfekkes wrote:
| On the same vein:
|
| Just let me pinch-to-zoom on a webpage (looking at you,
| substack!)
| Razengan wrote:
| God I absolutely abhor "UI takeovers":
|
| Not allowing text selection, disabling scrolling where there
| should be scrolling, disabling autocomplete/text substitutions,
| or corrupting the Back/Forward buttons...
|
| Websites are guilty of this more often than apps, which usually
| just do whatever the device OS allows.
|
| Even worse are the outright LIES that even Apple has been guilty
| of for a while now:
|
| * Refreshing a webpage doesn't really refresh it. (it's less
| fresh than entering the URL in a new tab/window)
|
| * Going back doesn't really go back. (It loads the URL
| again..absolutely disgusting on YouTube when you want to go back
| to an interesting thumbnail you noticed too late, but it's not
| there anymore)
|
| * Force-quitting an app doesn't really quit it. (Now iOS still
| gives them a noticeable bit of time to ponder which is annoying
| when you open that app again right away)
|
| Not to mention the outright privacy and security violations like
| textboxes that send keystrokes home.
| aartaka wrote:
| I did write on scrollbars too:
| https://aartaka.me/scrollbar.html
| dmkii wrote:
| By far the stupidest version of this to me has been Snowflake's
| implementation of previews. This is a database, where people
| preview the content of a table, not in an app, not on a phone,
| and someone thought it was a good idea to make that an image. I
| have no idea who ever thought this was a good idea, but here i am
| constantly tricked into thinking I can select some preview data,
| only to realise I have to go on a 10 clicks and a SQl query
| diversion to get it done.
| BrouteMinou wrote:
| Windows Powertoys, Text Extractor with: Win + Shift + T
|
| https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/text-ext...
| weinzierl wrote:
| Places that prevent selection completely is not something I
| encounter that often.
|
| What I do experience regularly is places where selection is
| broken or unnecessarily fiddly. On iOS I find it often easier to
| screenshot and select in the image.
|
| Screenshot, select, paste is a much smoother workflow than trying
| to select what I want three times, failing, selecting too much on
| one end, not enough on the other, copy, paste in Notes, fixing it
| up, select and finally copy what I wanted in the first place.
| jowea wrote:
| I remember seeing at least one site where the result of copying
| is garbled text.
| Self-Perfection wrote:
| Using text? How old school! This is not how current generation
| interacts with computers.
|
| My colleagues frequently send me cli output as screenshots
| instead of text. They are too accustomed to macOS embedded OCR I
| presume.
|
| Or how would they share event details on social media. Rarely
| there is text description, mostly date and time is imprinted on
| image in Instagram.
| varispeed wrote:
| I wish MS Word on Mac had a feature of selecting text. It used to
| work, but after update I cannot select any text.
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