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Comment by Fr0styMatt88 | Hacker News Reader

Worse than touch screens are those touch buttons (you know, where the thing is just printed on the outside of the TV).

I have no idea why, I'm fluent with touchscreens in the usual way but something in my brain just.... I don't know. Theoretically it should be the same, right? Except it feels horrible and wrong and I even have trouble trying to find the button.

Probably because I'm vision-impaired and an actual touchscreen is usually backlit and easier to see, while for physical buttons I've always compensated by using my sense of touch more (move hand towards general area of button, narrow it down with my fingertips).

The lack of the tactile click also certainly has something to do with it as pointed out above.

I'd actually be really interested to know from any UX design people here that work on this kind of thing - am I an outlier or does everyone hate them?

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It's not just you. Most touch screens will have some sort of feedback (visual, tactile or auditory) to let you know when you've pressed a button. Those touch buttons on screens and monitors don't.

Thank god the touchbar is finally gone from the MacBook. It was such a strange delight to use the new model and have the media keys reliably work.

I didn't mind the touchbar as a concept, but the implementation was terrible and it should never have replaced any keys.

I thought previously and how I'd be fine with it, but then realised its only tolerable when I can just completely ignore it and at that point I'd rather the cost go in to a part I do use. The 2021 model improved so many parts.

I rest my finger by the Esc key for some reason (vi use maybe) and every once in a while the screen would suddenly fade to black because it was registering a long key press on the Touch Bar[1] for the screen dim control. After a few times I realized I could customize the Touch Bar to only have a few necessary keys and keep them on the far right.

Just another case of inadvertent button activation for touch screens.

[1] iPad decided this should be capitalized, lol

Yes, I'd love to have the touch bar as long as still had the function keys. It was not terribly useful, but it was very expedient for stuff like controlling volume.

About touch buttons, I have seen once a lift with touch buttons for controls. For accessibility, the floor were also written in Braille. I thought to myself: "nice, they thought about vision impaired people".

Then, a friend of mine, which has completely lost vision and can read Braille, jokingly said to me when he arrived: "Trying to find the right button, I probably send the lift to all floors!"

That’s funny. And sad. Vision impaired people have really been taken by a rollercoaster with modern tech. First the touch screen which is useless (not sure if that’s the case still?). But then tech companies invested massively in voice interfaces for completely unrelated reasons, which I assume, is a godsend.

Those are known as optical switches. And they are horrible.

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