Just Let Me Select Text
Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago
aartaka.meTechstoryHigh profile
heatednegative
Debate
80/100
Text SelectionUser ExperienceMobile Apps
Key topics
Text Selection
User Experience
Mobile Apps
The author laments the inability to select text on certain websites and apps, sparking a heated discussion about the importance of text selection and the frustrations caused by its absence.
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Sep 24, 2025 at 9:56 AM EDT
3 months ago
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Sep 24, 2025 at 10:15 AM EDT
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3 months ago
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ID: 45360475Type: storyLast synced: 11/23/2025, 1:00:33 AM
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Technology!
edit: It is intentional for sure, the other entries in this blog have selectable text.
I guess it's performance art, so, thanks, I hate it.
Exquisite bait m'lord!
... or maybe the word that's connected to hippo and rhymes with "crisy"
The text in those screenshots is selectable!
=>
> activates Google Assistant that can copy a bunch of your personal data for eternal storage with Alphabet, building your personal profile there - with your permission, instead of them having to find some kind of excuse to obtain it
There, I fixed that for you.
Super ironic that often images are the most accessible way to share text data these days but that's what enshittification brought us.
(OkCupid also had an article saying why you should never pay for online dating, which coincidentally was taken down the same day they were acquired by Match.)
Also, OkCupid gave people different prices based on whether they said they were a man or woman. I wonder if anyone ever sued them in a class action.
I dunno. Even if I zoom so I can click precisely where I want to select or edit, my phone still insists on doing the operation in another place. And some places are just completely forbidden.
Using a computer with boxing gloves ought to be a lot more precise than that.
javascript:(function()%7B%0A%20%20function%20R(a)%7B%0A%20%20%20%20var%20ona=%22on%22+a;%0A%20%20%20%20if(window.addEventListener)%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20window.addEventListener(a,function(e)%7B%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20for(var%20n=e.originalTarget%7C%7Ce.target;n;n=n.parentNode)%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20n%5Bona%5D=null;%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%7D,true);%0A%20%20%20%20window%5Bona%5D=null;%0A%20%20%20%20document%5Bona%5D=null;%0A%20%20%20%20if(document.body)document.body%5Bona%5D=null;%0A%20%20%7D%0A%20%20R(%22contextmenu%22);%0A%20%20R(%22click%22);%0A%20%20R(%22mousedown%22);%0A%20%20R(%22mouseup%22);%0A%20%20R(%22selectstart%22);%0A%20%20//%20Remove%20CSS%20user-select%20restrictions%0A%20%20var%20style=document.createElement('style');%0A%20%20style.innerHTML='*%7Buser-select:auto%20!important;-webkit-user-select:auto%20!important;-moz-user-select:auto%20!important;-ms-user-select:auto%20!important;%7D';%0A%20%20document.head.appendChild(style);%0A%7D)();
```
This enables text selection and right clicking.
I cannot stop thinking about this; it honestly explains so much.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-pound_burger#Marketing_f...
You might be right but, citation needed.
Additionally: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/
22% of 12th graders are considered proficient in Math. This means:
NAEP Basic - Apply single-step percentages to solve real-world problems.
NAEP Proficient - Analyze information to solve real-world problems with proportional reasoning.
NAEP Advanced - Solve multi-step, real-world problems using percentages.
The score is an aggregate over questions testing many different skills, so while getting a low score suggests that a student is less skilled, it doesn't immediately tell you which skills they're bad at in particular. So this is exactly the scenario that 'ninkendo was talking about. If you want to know how many students correctly answered a specific question testing a certain skill, you would need the raw disaggregated data, which I don't think NAGB publishes.
I'd like to add that it's intentional that there are substantial numbers of students in each of the four buckets defined by the three thresholds, since the goal is to track the performance of the overall population, not just a few very bad or exceptionally good students.
Left to the vast majority of "normal" people who want to half-ass everything, there'd be absolutely no progress whatsoever, and what is more, society might actually fall apart.
Which is further confirmed by the fact that HN's audience skews towards the former and away from the latter.
And yes, by the way, i DO have a tattoo of the Lobotomized Owl selector. And no, you cannot see it. It's for the ladies' eyes only- and even then they have to demonstrate that they're within 5 IQ points of my own (preferably lower) beforehand. Nothin personnel kid.
> I’m lonely. Like everyone-ish else. Naturally, I’m on Bumble
In an app, undoing that is pretty much impossible (or at least, above my pay grade).
This is one of a million reasons why apps are so bad.
Just push the button to go to the task switch view and as long as the window preview thumbnail isn't blanked out, I can just get the phone to OCR any part of the screen in real time.
In my experience it is above the average user's pay grade to work around it in a browser too. Even power users will probably give up if the usual ways don't work out (holding alt, browser extension, reader mode). The power-est of users might glimpse at the inspector, but they'll give up if the nodes are obfuscated.
All this to say that with things like Circle To Search or Apple's built-in screenshot OCR nowadays websites and apps are finally on a level playing field when it comes to anyone being able to circumvent text protection.
That would in fact be a deliberate use of irony.
> Oh. Okay, so then what's satire?
> Nobody really knows!
I hope the author doesn't have any point beyond: "it's annoying to disable text selection"
Pros: 1. safer (what you see is what you select), 2. also works with images, 3. all text can be selected
Anything that is meant to be read as content should absolutely, without fail, be selectable and copyable (assuming appropriate permissions).
But stuff like tab headers, buttons, or even text-sparse tiles - things meant for the user to click on - can, and usually should, prevent text selection. It is super annoying to be clicking back and forth through tabs only to have some text erroneously highlight and then stay that way.
Exceptions to every rule, and to every exception of that rule, of course. But for the most part, allowing text highlighting in those clickable areas is a rough UX.
* note that I did not include anchor links; those are meant to be inline within text content and should therefore be selectable.
To each their own, but I'd rather neither of those things at the expense of not being able to select "Home", "My Account", "Settings", etc. Shit that nobody actually needs to select anyway.
Not translating entire articles to a language you don't support has the easy remedy of letting people select the text and use third party tools to support their specific use-cases. But not including translations for your clickable content for languages that aren't supported are the literal practical limits of ability. I would rather my apps work for people in languages I do support, with full accessibility (and minimal scripting overhead), than to have them work poorly for keyboard-only users in all languages, regardless of my app's support for them.
Again, we're talking about the stuff that should be iconic. Things that can literally be represented by icons. Buttons and tab headings. Things that you shouldn't actually need translated AT ALL, much less into every single language there is.
Right clicking a standard anchor element gives you the "copy link" option, but you don't get to copy the word without having it selected. Would be nice to just have a "copy word" feature, for starters. Could even be expanded so that it auto-selects the text after copying it so that if you wanted to copy more than just one word, you could expand the highlight (with the little widgets on mobile, or with keyboard/mouse selection in that one state on desktop) and then get a "copy text" option that copies all of the selected content.
Also if you're a non native speaker you want to be able to select the text so you can translate it
And, more pertinently, why should I support it, at the expense of keyboard-only users?
When you don't know the language or what "My Account" means? Not everyone speaks English.
Plain old text that can be selected is always going to be the most user friendly to non-native speaker users.
The question then is on the balance of trade offs which user group experience is the one you want to cater more to, non native speakers or keyboard-only users.
Edit: I love how one of the icons is 票 - perfectly self explanatory to Chinese speakers. Good luck if you don't speak Chinese which goes to show that icons are cultural to some degree
- English
- Mandarin
- Malay
- Tamil
Did you provide translations for all of those? If we expand to the immediate vicinity you can also throw in Thai and Vietnamese as well. Plenty of Japanese and Korean people live in Singapore too.
Do you have an example of a website where selectable text makes keyboard navigation not possible? Could this be a browser problem?
I can tab between links here in HN and it's perfectly also selectable.
Alternatively, set your cursor at the end of the header in the empty space, and drag your mouse backward to highlight the items. At that point, you can highlight the text, because you started in a non-user-select-limited area.
Note that this is default browser behavior. Inspect the styles and see that they have applied no selection styling to those anchors. This is the thing I'm advocating for. Make the web work like the web works, and disregard people telling you that "everything must be selectable" not because it shouldn't be, but because there are features that expect certain functionality to work well with the other features of the web.
You are saying "tab headers, buttons, or even text-sparse tiles [...] should, prevent text selection".
The website is advocating for not disabling selection, not for enabling in random places.
I am saying the web should work the way it is, like Hacker News does, as I already have brought up elsewhere.
You are saying "tab headers, buttons, or even text-sparse tiles [...] should, prevent text selection".
The article is saying the same thing I am. Basically don't do `user-select: none;`. The example is itself in the article's CSS.
You can drag slightly above/below to select it, or use shift + arrow keys. I personally use a plugin[0] to allow dragging within the text too, and haven't noticed any issues.
[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/drag-select-l...
> Note that this is default browser behavior [...] This is the thing I'm advocating for.
If you're just advocating for the default browser behaviour, which does somewhat allow selection of link text, then that may be worth clarifying above - since I think people are interpreting your comments as advocating for those buttons that prevent text selection entirely (and I'm not really sure how else to interpret "the default behavior should at the very least be mitigated").
The people who seem to have the most trouble understanding what I'm advocating for are the people who seem to only be taking a user-centric approach to the situation, rather than grappling with the practicalities of the web environment.
At this point, I'm over trying to make anyone understand anything. They'll either get it, when it is relevant for them to get it, or they won't and it won't matter to me or anyone else at all.
In a year, we might have better web functionality or a new built-in browser or OS feature, or any number of other things that could mitigate this specific gripe, so I'm not super concerned about any of it. Those that understand what I'm saying will have better UX for heeding the advice with appropriate exception. And those that don't won't make UX worth using. No worries either way!
Not everyone is fluent in every language, and not every website works perfectly with the browser's translator.
There will be situations where people will want to translate that ONE word that is actually in a button or tab, and isn't selectable because someone thought they knew better.
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.
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.
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