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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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‽
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
isn't selectable because it breaks the UX for keyboard-only users.
Has nothing to do with "thinking" anything. It's about testing with accessibility parameters and knowing* what practical problems occur.
If you really need to translate ONE WORD, it's not that onerous to type it. You're bringing edge-case hypotheticals to a discussion about practical functionality.
I already asked below, how and where does it break?
Hacker News is fully selectable, and still fully useable with the keyboard.
> it's not that onerous to type it.
Yes it is, if I don't even know what the letters are. Not every country uses the latin alphabet. And not every people coming to latin-alphabet countries know what those letters are.
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.
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:
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
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.
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.
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)?
> 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?
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.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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 "下单" and "返回" mean without copy-pasting them into a translator?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
> 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»
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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").
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A menu with "我的帳戶" 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.)
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.)
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 票 - 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
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.
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.
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:
(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.)
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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).
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.
Unless the App Developer has chosen to blanket deny screenshots. This is common on view accepting payment information but blanket application is also common.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ;)
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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!
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!
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.
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.
[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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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 :(
> 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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> I have a habit of selecting and highlighting text on computer screens, while reading.
"There are dozens of us!"
Hi, fellow compulsive selectors! Thanks, I am no longer feeling alone!
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.
The hardest part is to remember not to do it when sharing screens...
I still do it, for emphasis. Never had anyone complain thus far.
Me too!
Developed this habit as a kid on a Mac IIcx in 1992. Hard to break.
Glad also to feel justified at last!
Seriously! Same! Relieved to know I'm not alone in having this quirk.
Such a relief! But it drives my wife completely crazy.
Some of us were even actively selecting and highlighting that text as we were reading it! ;)
Hell yeah, I did that!
Join the club, we have compulsive mouse habits.
(am a member of this select club)
Plus knocking on the desk when I finish a sentence, too.
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 :)
me too!
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.
substack is the biggest culprit in this.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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‽
I was worried I was the only one who did this. Glad to know I'm not alone out there.
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?
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.
I literally selected your comment as I read it. I do the same.
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.
You might mean N64.com, which later evolved into IGN64/IGN
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.
I love you
Totally agreed. I’m often compulsively highlighting things too, and I often get caught in clickable areas. We need proper text content, not this.
Same here. I was doing it while reading your comment. I imagine there are dozens of other people doing it as well, haha.
Ditto!
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.
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.
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 ;/
I am not alone in this universe???
I selected and highlighted your comment dozen times while I was reading it :)
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.
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.
relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/1271/
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 ...
I'm doing it right now.
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.
One of my ticks is repeatedly highlighting text over and over. I blame years of drone splitting.
It also helps me focus on reading.
What is drone splitting?
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.
Someone played EVE Online.
Or StarCraft…
https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/11tb1gp/how_come...
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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
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.
> 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.
OCR seems to be working on recent Android versions not only Google hardware.
Yep, on my S22, I long-press home and can then circle or swipe text to copy, or translate if needed.
This is my favorite feature on Android next to sideloading.
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.
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.
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.
At least in Firefox, holding down alt while selecting let's you do it within a link without triggering a click event.
Double click selects text. What to do with web app elements where people double click or rapidly click?
Double click selects text.
That is what it should do.
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.
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.
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.
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...
More OSs should adopt X11 paste from the primary selection. It can safely coexist with a regular clipboard.
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.
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.
Oh don't worry, it's a tooltip, so you can see it, but not copy it.
I almost always copy this by double clicking after the `/` in the URL
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.
Enter, stage left, ServiceNow hell urls
My company has dedicated years of engineering time to add custom "copy" buttons next to text that they spent months to make non-selectable.
> text that they spent months to make non-selectable.
Just curious, what was the original reason(s) to make the text non-selectable.
That's why we don't have flying cars.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why do you make a difference between tabs in a native app and in a web app? The optimal UX should be the same.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
isn't selectable because it breaks the UX for keyboard-only users.
Has nothing to do with "thinking" anything. It's about testing with accessibility parameters and knowing* what practical problems occur.
If you really need to translate ONE WORD, it's not that onerous to type it. You're bringing edge-case hypotheticals to a discussion about practical functionality.
I already asked below, how and where does it break?
Hacker News is fully selectable, and still fully useable with the keyboard.
> it's not that onerous to type it.
Yes it is, if I don't even know what the letters are. Not every country uses the latin alphabet. And not every people coming to latin-alphabet countries know what those letters are.
Hacker news isn't "fully selectable". Just try to highlight the text in the reply/update/submit buttons.
I can select the word reply, like sibling poster said, but also the glyphs.
https://imgur.com/hEDe7Vd
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.
macOS Safari
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:
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>!
I can select the word "Reply" with no issues
Inside the button? Not the link? What OS/Browser?
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
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.
You can copy <button>Text</button> in some browsers, but not when it's in <input text="Text">.
Yeah, in HN's case:
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.
Sure, I had one recently.
There is a certain page of one of the Bundesagentur für Arbeit websites that doesn't play well with automatic translation.
I speak B2 level German, but even then some of the technical terms are still complicated or unknown for me. This included one very long German word that was in a BIG RED button and the text in the big red button was not selectable, in the manner described in the article.
> 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.
Worse in what way? For keyboard use, I want text to be selectable, since I'll often use shift + arrow keys while reading.
And you still haven't explained why normal-selectable websites like HN itself are bad for keyboard users.
I use HN from Links daily, on a terminal. It's perfectly usable.
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)?
> 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?
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
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.
> 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?
> 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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
Same way I do: with your OS's on-screen keyboard.
Congratulations on being fluent in Hanzi, I guess, but that does not solve a problem for the vast majority of the users.
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.
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.
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.
…or just don’t break the web with accessibility/usability breaking CSS in the first place.
>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?
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?
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.
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?
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.
good thing it can take a screenshot then
Do me a favor and type this into a translation app without selecting it:政府
> 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.
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.
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 "下单" and "返回" mean without copy-pasting them into a translator?
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.
Not to be argumentative, but the chance of my correctly drawing "下单" and "返回" - especially using my finger on a phone screen - rounds to 0.
I think a way to resolve things like this is to have media features.
For example:
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:
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/
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I appreciate your understanding!
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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."
> 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.
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?
Accidential drags are can be detected an prevented in JS, which is imho the best solution.
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.
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.
Do you know how many times i wanted to select the clickable link in google search result?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Totally not, those ahould be selectable too.
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.
What's that behavior?
Do you have an example of a website where selectable text makes keyboard navigation not possible? Could this be a browser problem?
I can tab between links here in HN and it's perfectly also selectable.
Use a mouse to click inside of a word link (like "threads") in the HN header. Try to drag to highlight. Note that the link tries to drag instead of highlighting. This is default behavior for anchors because of the issues that it would otherwise cause with the whole selection API.
Alternatively, set your cursor at the end of the header in the empty space, and drag your mouse backward to highlight the items. At that point, you can highlight the text, because you started in a non-user-select-limited area.
Note that this is default browser behavior. Inspect the styles and see that they have applied no selection styling to those anchors. This is the thing I'm advocating for. Make the web work like the web works, and disregard people telling you that "everything must be selectable" not because it shouldn't be, but because there are features that expect certain functionality to work well with the other features of the web.
> 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").
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!
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.
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.
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.
Try to navigate inside the article, it doesn't work at all.
The article doesn't have selectable text.
Yeah that was the point. Disabling text selection also inhibits cursor movement even without selecting anything.
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.
This breaks translation. Text must be selectable.
Good UX means including translations for supported languages, not telling the user "do it yourself by highlighting content".
Not translating entire articles to a language you don't support has the easy remedy of letting people select the text and use third party tools to support their specific use-cases. But not including translations for your clickable content for languages that aren't supported are the literal 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.
What about unsupported languages?
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.
What would be your ideal solution to the described problem? (Clicking on UI elements selecting text instead of processing the click)
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.
It does give you the search this text option.
I personally like to click text absent mindedly when I'm reading a bit like holding your finger while reading
Also if you're a non native speaker you want to be able to select the text so you can translate it
Why would you want to translate "My Account" into another language?
And, more pertinently, why should I support it, at the expense of keyboard-only users?
> 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.
And you also can't understand the icon? And the context? And the translations I provided?
A menu with "我的帳戶" 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.)
Ah, so the website had bad UX? I think we've found the issue!
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.)
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 票 - 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
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.
I disagree. Selection takes priority.
Add this as a favorite/bookmark:
Extra treat: this other one allows to copy text and open the context menu in pages that are written by rats who disable it: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.
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.
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.)
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!
You can select the text by disabling CSS.
or switching to the txt version: https://aartaka.me/select-text.txt
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.
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.
I can't even check out any time I like because of pop-up notifications :-(
They stil got the never leave part right.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
I do exactly the same thing. thought I was the only weird one.
Blessed are the sites that allow symmetric selections, cursed those that make it wonky.
you too?
I triple tap my trackpad (on macOS) to highlight the paragraph I'm reading, then highlight the next one and so on.
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.
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).
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.
Unless the App Developer has chosen to blanket deny screenshots. This is common on view accepting payment information but blanket application is also common.
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.
I use it for translation all the time on my Pixel 7a with Gemini
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.
That's a very different flow with a much higher friction compared to simply long pressing the home button in any app.
Yeah. (What would be the equivalent to long pressing the home button when Android gestures are used, and there is no home button?)
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.
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.
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.
Press and hold bottom line - I use it regularly
All text is selectable on the app switcher granted it uses OCR so YMMV
I had no idea that was a thing, neat!
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.
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.
Need to make sure you take a picture of it on a wooden table. https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Web_0_0x2e_1
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I remember seeing at least one site where the result of copying is garbled text.
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.
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
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.
“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 :)
https://github.com/naelstrof/maim/ it's a screenshot utility
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
Windows Powertoys, Text Extractor with: Win + Shift + T
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/text-ext...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ;)
Screenshot, Copy, New from Clipboard in Preview.app, Tools -> Text Selection, select your text.
Hack the planet.
Awesome! Much appreciated bro.
And yet... https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EAsh47yWwAAxU1m?format=jpg&name=...
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
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Easier to just use a userscript plugin and have it override those settings on every page
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.
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)
Same with many "business" websites such as Outlook and Teams. "Inspect element" to copy innerText is already in muscle memory.
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.
I made/use this to get around the inability to select text: https://github.com/schappim/macOCR
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's not only text. Images and videos are obfuscated to make copy/downloading harder.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, sure, but that's not too efficient. A screenshot is a couple MB at least while the text is a KB or so.
Yet I can't select text on this very blog.
Given that text is selectable elsewhere on the site, I suspect that the author is trying to make a point by that.
I think that's the point...
I presume so but it adds nothing to the topic ƪ(˘⌣˘)ʃ
It does add a comic effect, so I consider it quite useful.
You can select the text by disabling CSS.
Or by visiting a rendering which doesn't support CSS at all: eg https://aartaka.me/select-text.txt
This hack is exactly why I do multi-format posts.
> 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"
For Tinder if you're on desktop you can use the website (tinder.com), don't believe that blocks selecting text.
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.
On the same vein:
Just let me pinch-to-zoom on a webpage (looking at you, substack!)
So the joke here is that the text on the webpage is not selectable, right?
Making the text on the page not selectable is chef’s kiss good.
Glad you noticed!
How are they going to make money letting you do what you want?
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.
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.
Trying to select the text on the page and it took me a few seconds to get the joke
I thought I was alone, until today!!
This is what drives crazy when browsing google search results on Mobile Safari!
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.
Yeah, that’s a really valuable thing to have an affirmation for one’s feelings and experiences. Especially when worded well.
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.
> 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?
I do. Because that’s the truth and a part of my life choices.
I was surprised to see nobody else commenting on that. A wild start to a post.
I wish MS Word on Mac had a feature of selecting text. It used to work, but after update I cannot select any text.
This is why I use webpages instead of apps if possible. Firefox reader mode usually defeats not being able to select and copy.
Dating apps are not meant to be efficient, definitely not to someone with a developer mindset.
Yeah, you're not supposed to switch to a different app. They want you to stay in the app and engage.
And that sucks.
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.
Addendum: Just let me save images.
(I can't stand IG for this reason.)
fun fact: I cant select text in this website from phone.. I am use firefox nightly. Selection only works on .txt version of site
iOS has been so bad at it; selecting text to copy and then find out the last one or two characters are missing :/
why do you think the German girl wants you to translate her profile?
That was not implied by the post.
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.
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.
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.
The post used an example of a Bumble match though. So it kind of makes sense one can discuss it alongside the main message.
>Every day this forum becomes more like reddit
Ooh, caught one in the wild!
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
> title
> 9 words in: text in a .png
This also affects navigating the webpage with a cursor (F7 in firefox).
The problem is so prevalent that Microsoft has a PowerToy specifically for OCRing pixels.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/text-ext...
Are you machine?
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
Texts in images are searchable in Safari. Out of the box.
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.
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.
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.
On iOS and Macs, just take a screenshot and then select the automatically OCR'd text. Works flawlessly.
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.
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.
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.
Hey Artyom. :P
Hey Joel, glad to see you here!
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:
Of course all the links are `target=_blank` too. I really don’t understand the mentality of whomever makes these.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.
Google lens is a god send for this
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!
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
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!
Agreed with the overall sentiment but screenshot+immediate text select on iOS/Mac has solved 99% of my issues here
Technology!
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.
Right, the more steps there are in the process, the more people just drop and forget it.
Screenshot, paste in LLM, select text is my workaround.
You can use OS-native ways for that, no need to burn forest just for text OCR.
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.
There’s always hope.
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.
That’s a terrible use of technology. You can just read that. No need for a forest-burning slop machine there.
It's actually searching google and referencing newspaper articles. That's very helpful to me and saves me a lot of time.
Another website where you can't post as yourself. What is the point
Android can do this with a single gesture.
Just sayin' ...
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
[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.
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.
Pure does that pricing thing too, and that kind of makes sense given how disproportionate privilege and “supply/demand” is on dating apps.
> 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.
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).
That’s a fun idea, though I realize we’re too deep in backwards-looking design to ever fix that.
Instagram is the same way if a link is dropped into the comments. Infuriating.
Given that this page has the following styles which aren't applied anywhere else on the blog:
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.> nor "ironic", but an intentional effort to demonstrate how annoying
That would in fact be a deliberate use of irony.
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!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaFctEu3ETU
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 :(
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.
Because people don't understand what a joke is sometimes, even on that's obvious like this.
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 ..
That I can relate to, and that’s how some of my blog posts get born. Like this one.
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.
> 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.
on Mac/iOS you can just take a screenshot and then select out of the image.
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.
whoa, didn't know I could do that! thanks for the tip.
iPhone has had this for years.
Yeah, and I think it was there for longer than on Pixels.
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).
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.
"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.
I can pretty much guarantee that an app like Bumble is not a webview wrapper.
You can never know nowadays. But yeah, it must be a native app, at least on iOS with its PWA-hostile policies.
But unlike Hinge, Bumble is usable on desktop (where getting the text would be a lot easier).
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.
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"
Lol, that’s a good proof for my point. And a fun one at that! Thanks.
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
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.
No browser extensions necessary, just right click > inspect element > select <body>, then turn off the CSS rules you don't want.
You’re right with your analysis, but I still find this device ironic in addition to what you said.
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.
It was.
In uBlock:
Wouldn't recommend applying this _everywhere_; the `body *` selector may have a significant performance impact on some pages.
Not any more. All modern browser engines read right to left.
I have a bookmarklet just to deal with this kind of websites lol
Would you share perhaps?
Yeah, do share it!
Are people these days so dense (i.e. stupid) they couldn't figure out it was a joke by the author?
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.
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...
Thank you! I heard that on the radio decades ago but never saw a source to point people to. Wikipedia, who knew?
Should have promoted a quarter-plus-twelfth burger! That's about 37%!
Why complicate it: just advertise a fifth
With a price markup.
Thanks for this, wow.
I would hope fervently that HackerNews would be subject to selection bias and would be an exception, but who knows.
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.
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.
Even harder to understand that 1 part vinegar and 3 parts olive oil isn't 1/3 vinegar.
One cup vinegar and three cups olive oil will give you four cups salad dressing.
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.
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.
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/nationsreportcard/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.
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.
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.
This is a good clarification, thank you.
I wouldn't make assumptions. There are a lot of people here...
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.
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.
I did write on scrollbars too: https://aartaka.me/scrollbar.html
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?
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.
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.
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.
Huh, draggability is a good argument, actually.
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.
Still, it’s sad we’re in this timeline.
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.
Yeah, all these extra steps for something that should've been native in the first place. Ugh.
>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.
Life goals.
this is a client issue.
Ironic, can’t select your text either!
use android/ gemini circle to search
Not portable across different flavors of Android, but yeah, it’s a solution too.
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).
The irony here being that text cannot be selected in this post...
I upvoted you. This is really an irony. Hilarious.
Made it for y’all, it’s cool you noticed!
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.
Accessibility though...