spiders

daydreams, imaginary friends

traitorous fifth column secret fae here to tear apart the human world floorboard by floorboard with my teeth

we are always learning things about the world, and so excited to share them with you

see @iliana for our good posts


PLEASE stop doing this thing where you hide the scroll bar when it's not being used, or make it invisible, or super thin and difficult to see. this post explains why. as an example of this...


i just upgraded to firefox 102.3esr, and they pushed out a user interface change where the scroll bar is hidden until you mouse over it, unless you dig through the mountains of settings to find the new checkbox they added (under the confusingly named "browsing" section).

the scrollbar being there is not an outdated relic of the past. it is a ACCESSIBILITY tool, that people like me rely on in order to scroll through web pages. i rely on an eye tracker because of wrist+hand disabilities, and clicking on the scroll bar remains the easiest way for me to navigate a web page.

and when i do use a physical pointing device for input, i can't even use a scroll wheel, that's just not an option for me due to chronic wrist pain. i have to use the broad up and down motions of the scroll bar.

when you set the scroll bar to hide by default, or you make it super tiny and hard to click on or even see, it makes it so much more difficult for disabled people to use your app.

extremely tired of the wave after wave of bullshit graphic design fads that make developers think they have to change their user interfaces all the time, in particular when it leads to less accessible user interfaces. detrimental user interface tinkering is at best irritating, and at worst a accessibility problem, all in the name of chasing fad after fad of aesthetics.


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in reply to @spiders's post:

if you put developers in charge of a city they would be like "it's long since time that we removed these ugly and unsightly tactile pavers on our curb cuts, to better pursue the minimalist aesthetic which is the future of good design. and we should stop having walk signals announce out loud when it's safe to walk- good design should speak for itself!"

you almost certainly already have tried, but if you middle click a non-link in a page that scrolls, at least on windows and Linux scroll will follow the mouse, and might enable easier bindings than the scrollbar even if i think the scrollbar also shouldn't be hidden

this doesn't really work for me because it scrolls very fast and can be erotic erratic with eye tracking

talon has a similar mode where the scroll follows your gaze at a much more reasonable pace, which we also sometimes use, but it's situational and a lot of the time just clicking the scroll bar is better because its less vocal strain

edit: correction of extremely funny dictographic error

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