Hacker News Reader

Comment by whstl | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

Hacker news isn't "fully selectable". Just try to highlight the text in the reply/update/submit buttons.

I can select the word "Reply" with no issues

Inside the button? Not the link? What OS/Browser?

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:

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

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 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:

username: password:

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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>!

Works on chrome/linux as well, but you do have to know how to drag from outside the link, or switch to caret browsing (f7)

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.

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)?

Worse in what way? For keyboard use, I want text to be selectable, since I'll often use shift + arrow keys while reading.

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