"There are dozens of us!"

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Another example for buttons. Assuming I don't speak Chinese, how could I know what "下单" and "返回" mean without copy-pasting them into a translator?

Some PDF datasheets somehow prevent selection. Deeply annoying. You just know there is some fool calling that shot, thinking their protecting something precious.

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.

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)

Exquisite bait m'lord!

... or maybe the word that's connected to hippo and rhymes with "crisy"

And in Japan, the general layout of the "Go back to previous screen" and "confirm and continue" (left and right, respectively), is reversed from what English readers might be used to.

So if I can't select the text... I open up a hand-drawing-chinese-characters app and slowly draw out each character? I'd rather be able to select the text.

Note: unfortunately, so many button in Japanese UIs are actually .png files. I know this from experience of using and building apps and websites here.

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."

The only thing it helps in is helping banks close the tickets when you inform them of a bug and they ask for screenshots and you tell them you can't because their app doesn't allow it, so "… closing this ticket since we received no further input from the customer. Please feel free to reply if you need anything else."

They never tell me to take a photo from another app and I never volunteer to do that because if they reply like this I know they are not going to work on the bug.

Can you not disable this? I just tested on stock iOS, and I can screenshot all of my banking apps.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Super ironic that often images are the most accessible way to share text data these days but that's what enshittification brought us.

=>

> 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.

And yet... https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EAsh47yWwAAxU1m?format=jpg&name=...

(am a member of this select club)

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.

https://imgur.com/a/NctIGsK

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

I don't know why this is standard but it is very annoying.

Selecting stuff allowed me to see if the computer had frozen and required a reboot.

Those where the wild times ;/

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‽

There isn't a great workaround for mobile apps though.

This does not happen on my windows machines, must be something configurable, I would hate it.

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.

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 :)

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.

Maybe because it was easy to scrape the text and make your own lyrics website or something?

I also think that google's song lyrics (on the search page itself) used to be non-selectable. But I jsut tried it, and they are selectable now.

Developed this habit as a kid on a Mac IIcx in 1992. Hard to break.

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).

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.

That is some Windows UI stuff, If I recall correctly in OSX you don't double click as much.

I agree with your address example. That is user data, and it should be selectable.

Often when translating it's easier to just OCR the area with the dictionary app, which is madness when it started as text.

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.

For example:

  @media(prefers-user-select: all){ * {user-select: all;} }

If it was an established known issue, then maybe people would do something like:

   :not(:lang('base-lang')) { * {user-select: all;}  }

- 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/

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?

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.

This is a standard UI convention used by all internal dev tools at my current company.

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.

However, I am sympathetic to those arguing translation. Sometimes I'll visit Japanese or Chinese websites. With some frequency, even if most of the site has an English edition, I'll find some UI element not translated, including buttons and the like... OK I think it was the commenter that I responded to, in a different reply said... just Google it if it's a single word. Great! But I don't even know where to begin to get the right characters from my old fashioned US keyboard. So now I have to Google for how to use my keyboard to get the characters I want, which also may need pre-requisite knowledge of the language I'm trying to translate (radicals and all that jazz)... that's a heavier lift than may be anticipated and where a simple copy/paste into an appropriate translator would make things much, much easier.

I would suggest this: make everything buttons, links, tabs, etc. selectable and copyable unless there is a real explicit and compelling reason to do otherwise. Now to be fair, I'm old enough to have been "online" in some fashion or another since before general public internet access availability was a thing... so my expectations for butter-like user experiences are low and my desire to do any damn thing I want high... but even today, there are probably still more websites which don't stop you from copying anything than there are searching for that polished experience where only the right things can be selected. The discontinuity and the deviation from the expectation that I can copy anything I also find as something which diminishes the user experience, even if occasionally I'm annoyed by over selecting things.

That is what it should do.

Not making text selectable is extra work. You have to go out of your way to do that. That's the optimization, not the other way around.

If you just do things the way the web expects you will be shocked how much stuff magically works.

The back button too? Yeah, you don't need logic for that. That should just work right off the rip.

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.

Just curious, what was the original reason(s) to make the text non-selectable.

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.

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.

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.

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.

How would you have me type it?

If the word uses the exact character set on your keyboard, sure. How am I going to type Kanji?

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?

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.

The text in those screenshots is selectable!

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...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack

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.

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?

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?

The difference is now I know git and text editor with hot-save support; with mostly textual clipboard, the texts usually just land in either git/editor.

https://imgur.com/hEDe7Vd

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...

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.

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

There is a certain page of one of the Bundesagentur für Arbeit websites that doesn't play well with automatic translation.

I speak B2 level German, but even then some of the technical terms are still complicated or unknown for me. This included one very long German word that was in a BIG RED button and the text in the big red button was not selectable, in the manner described in the article.

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.

I am curious what operating system you can select text from the buttons on though. I might spin up browserstack to experiment.

I think I found your problem. Not sure why you think the solution is to make everything work worse for keyboard users.

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.

yes it's absolutely just as easy to point my phone's translate app at the button.

any more questions?

You can highlight the buttons (most times) in Safari on MacOS, but you can't select the text and copy it or translate it.

Not that I am searching, but I wonder if there's already tog/nielson/other ux research on this specific interaction.

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.

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.

The other involves opening a screenshot tool, selecting a rectangle, going to a website (that I might have to pay for?), pasting the image, waiting some seconds to cause global warming, getting some text back, clicking just after that text to just before that text.

How is that a similar level of effort?

The first I could walk someone who had never used a computer through over the phone in 1995. The second I wouldn't want to walk some of my coworkers through today.

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:

But yeah, HN isn't the best in this regard :)

Maybe dang will one day consider changing to <button>reply</button>!

    <input value="reply" type="submit">

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)?