Just Let Me Select Text

Would you share perhaps?

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.

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.

I almost always copy this by double clicking after the `/` in the URL

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?

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.

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.

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...

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?

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).

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

For example:

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

If it was an established known issue, then maybe people would do something like:

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

- 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/

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.

you too?

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.

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.

Press and hold bottom line - I use it regularly

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.

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.

or switching to the txt version: https://aartaka.me/select-text.txt