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Comment by csmantle | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

It's definitely not the easiest thing, but I imagine that someone working with Chinese characters often would have learned enough about radicals and stroke order to do it in a pinch. The hardest part is memorizing the characters; the OCR in, say, Google Translate, is quite good at picking out what you meant.

> It's definitely not the easiest thing

If only there was an easier way to "select" a character on a website instead of having to effin' handwrite it out on a separate app.

...OCR, as I said. But handwriting skills and radical knowledge are nice to have in case those services go down or you're dealing with bad handwriting.

I think a way to resolve things like this is to have media features.

For example:

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

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:

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

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.

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