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Comment by hypercube33 | Hacker News Reader

Also don't mess with scroll bars. Seems to be a more recent trend to make them about 1px wide on everything

Indeed, tiny scroll bars make it impossible to use a touch screen.

If you really want your app to be ergonomic, make sure it works with one and two finger gestures, such as dragging a finger to scroll.

Touch screens should support two-finger drag scrolling which is a much bigger hit-target than any scrollbar.

Sure, but I can grab the scroll handle and yank it down to 75% instantly. How much superfluous motion do I have to endure on a long page to even find 75%? Can I see how far along I am on the page with the invisible scroll bar that barely renders anything? Is the rendering of its overall progress consistent between applications, if not completely broken?

The boring, "ugly" built-in OS widget works extremely well. Every attempt to replace it with something better for one use case inevitably throws out a dozen others that the designer didn't think about.

You should be able to click at 75% on the scroll bar and immediately jump there, no grab and drag needed. MacOS still offers this option, but apps that reinvent the scroll bar never respect this system-wide setting.

I'm OK with them popping up on mouse-over, many web sites have taken the easy route and disabled them completely on one or both axes.

Then the only way to scroll on desktop is to highlight text across the frame's edge.

Nah, I hate that. Frequently it gets in my way when I have my screen split with two browsers side by side. I'll try to hover over the scrollbar on the right hand side of the left page, try to click, and end up clicking the right window. Give me the whole damn scrollbar please.

Exactly. I have a 5120-pixel-wide monitor. I can afford the space needed to display a scroll bar.

Middle click your mouse button then move mouse to the right, thats the best way to do it.

shift + mouse scroll for horizontal scroll works too, at least on Firefox.

Yeah, if I'm reading something, I want to have an indication of how long a page is and where I am currently. I don't want to have to move my mouse somewhere to get that information.

I usually hide them. I try to not use overflowing content, but when it has to overflow I hide the scrollbar because scrollbars disrupt the design and the standard ones are extremely ugly.

How can you make an assertion like "they are extremely ugly" when they're different or absent entirely depending on device and browser? Don't make decisions for your users, this breaks expectations and accessibility.

I dont want users that need handholding anyway. I want my app to look good. Almost all scrollbars on all of my devices and browsers look ugly. Users that need handholding usually also are the more problematic users.

What a horrible, anti-social attitude. I hope you aren’t working on anything important.

Shocker, apps do not have to be for everyone.

You don't know who you are excluding by working against accessibility. It's very naive and small-minded of you to think that you are only inconveniencing some caricature in your head.

I am inconveniencing my time which is important to me. I dont have to build my apps accessible to everyone as they are clearly not purposed for everyone. Whats so hard to understand with that?

You should publicize these apps so we know to actively avoid them.

Way to spit in the faces of disabled people!

So if i am building my own house i should also spend thousands of dollars more to make it accessible? If my house isnt accessible do i also spit disabled people in the face?

> So if i am building my own house i should also spend thousands of dollars more to make it accessible? If my house isnt accessible do i also spit disabled people in the face?

not hiding the scrollbars on your website doesn't cost you thousands of dollars so I don't really see the equivalence

Yea but theres a difference in showing scrollbars and making the whole website accessible.

HTML is accessible by default. Problems only arise when you try to be clever.

That's a poor analogy - a house is private property which only you and invited guests may enter. A website you publish on the Internet can be viewed by anyone who discovers it. Not including accessibility features excludes disabled users from reaping the benefits of your site. So a better analogy would be "if I build a public space do I have to make it accessible?" You betcha!

I guess this is a philosophical discourse. I simply build my own apps not for everyone and its not my problem if someone has a problem with that. If I build something thats meant for the public I try to build it accessible, but only if I feel like its needed. Seems like there is a market for accessibility software, why not jump on it? Why isn't the accessibility software good enough to not make the devs go extra steps on projects that are clearly not meant for everyone? The internet is for everyone, sure. My apps aren't. Simple as that.

> Why isn't the accessibility software good enough to not make the devs go extra steps on projects that are clearly not meant for everyone?

Is it not an extra step to intentionally hide the scroll bar? And thus, simply no extra work to just... not? Scrolls bars are a convenient feature for all users, nobody is judging the appearance of your website around how it looks with a scroll bar.

Try building a modern looking website only for scrollbars to look like they are from 1990. They break immersion. Especially on artsy websites that try to immerse people.

This is like people who use synonyms prolifically, replacing all of their words so that lexical units do not repeat. It appears jarring and somewhat pretentious, past a certain point: readers will rarely notice the common UI paradigms which they have come to expect, but viewers assuredly become aware upon contradictory circumstances such as absence. Some feel these pseudo-minimalistic phenomena are grating. You intend greatness alongside immersion, however an effect most contrary may occur.

Art? Nah. (Maybe once.) Dead horse gimmick, now.

Sooner or later, you will be less able than you are now. Everyone faces disability, it's just a matter of when, or how rapidly it happens.

I already face disability as i have to wear glasses to see properly. Still wont change the fact that I wont put the burden of making my apps accessible onto myself as they clearly aren't meant for disabled people and/or people that I don't want to use my app.

What happens if you drop your glasses and they break. Will you squint & hunt for your scrollbars ?

I'd buy new glasses.

> So if i am building my own house i should also spend thousands of dollars more to make it accessible?

Well, you don't know what tomorrow you will need. I remember my grandmother needing to make the house accessible after my grandfather lost control of half his body after a stroke.

And those accessibility enhancements are not a problem even if they're not directly needed anymore: no steps between rooms, big sliding doors, lot of space for the shower etc. Even able people can appreciate those.

Whats the issue with getting them once they are needed?

It may be harder to had them or more expensive. And the fact you suddenly need them also mean there are low chances you'll be able to do the work yourself.

Like: build a house on only one floor so no stairs => no need for elevators later on. But it requires more floor space.

I don't give a rats ass about your design when it is in conflict with usability.

Give me a butt ugly but usable website/program over an overdesigned artwork with essential functionality hidden away to make room for even more pointless whitespace.

I would've agreed with you if I didn't start with Firefox on my web design journey. I never found scroll bars to that problematic because FF has pretty sleek ones. So I always ensured scrolling worked on overflow, when I started to more seriously test and use chrome I was absolutely disgusted by those vile thick scroll bars that would ruin my amateur design. But by that time I had understood that scroll bars are a need not a want.

They are a want. You can keep scrolling functionality without having scrollbars. If you write apps that serve the biggest demographic possible I get your sentiment. I dont want to serve to the biggest demographic possible, I want to serve specific people.

I love vanishing scrollbars. The moment I move my mouse, they're there. When I stop, they're gone. Want to see progress? Nudge the mouse.

I'm glad at least one person likes that "feature".

I guess folks who rotate their monitors to portrait mode would appreciate not wasting the entire height on a permanent scroll bar, but I like knowing how far I am into the page (not that that's really a true indication of where the page will end due to how large the modern header and footer regions tend to be nowadays).

Don't forget lazy-loaded content as a further perversion of the scrollbar :'( Discourse is my mortal enemy.

Most vanishing scrollbars only show up if you mouse over them or use some other means to start scrolling; simply moving the cursor when it's over the content doesn't make them show up.

Yes, that’s true for Safari, for example. But Firefox shows it as soon as you move your mouse.

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