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jwr 4 days ago

Incidentally, I've been trying to use the keyboard to scroll webpages recently, and it's a disaster. Nobody does it, apparently.

PageUp/PageDown do not work correctly on sites that have a permanent topbar (some of the content is never shown). Cursor up/down often does something unexpected (for example in Mastodon, if you use PageDown several times and then cursor down, you will get yanked back).

I think it is a sad regression. Not everybody is able to use the mouse and its scrollwheel!

chrismorgan 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

I use Space/Shift+Space and PageUp/PageDown and End¹ for vertical scrolling all the time. It’s nowhere near a disaster. I also disable JS by default, which… well, actually that might help sometimes. And hinder other times.

Rarely, I find a page that doesn’t use the document scroll area, but makes its own which is not focused, and so you have to focus that (by Tab as many times as necessary, or by clicking) before you can scroll by keyboard. But that’s rare.

Long ago, Firefox started compensating for sticky headers, reducing the amount it would scroll the page by, and it mostly works well, though it’s not flawless. I don’t think I’ve observed the same feature in other browsers. One amusing situation that can arise is when the header disappears when you go down and reappears when you go up, so that repeating PageUp and PageDown yields net movement in one direction.

—⁂—

¹ End, but not Home, which is Fn+Left on my laptop, but the Left key hasn’t worked for over a year now. I’ve contemplated replacing the battery and keyboard, but the laptop’s falling apart in enough other ways it doesn’t quite feel worth the investment…

treetalker 4 days ago | parent [-]

Just dropping a note to say I appreciate your asterism! :-)

chrismorgan 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

A few years ago I thought long and hard, tried quite a few different things, and ended up settling on that sequence. And with this in my ~/.XCompose:

  <Multi_key> <h> <r> : "—⁂—"
… I can get it by typing `Compose h r`. (“hr” as in <hr>, HTML’s Horizontal Rule.)

At one point since then I came across another person on HN that had independently settled on the same three characters (em dash, asterism, em dash).

In my personal dialect of the lightweight markup language I’ve been making, —⁂— is even the syntax for a horizontal rule. :-)

encom 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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AlienRobot 4 days ago | parent [-]

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Izkata 3 days ago | parent [-]

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cool-RR 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I wrote this Chrome extension to solve this problem for myself 2 years ago: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/focustoscroll/jbcpo...

Apparently no one else was interested in it. I still use it daily.

cluckindan 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In the EU and the US, this kind of broken accessibility is not legal and the service providers can be sued.

Only applies to public and commercial services, though.

mathiaspoint 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Sometimes page up/down seek the video on YouTube. That's terrible.

makeitdouble 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Mapping mouse events to key shortcuts might be the only way forward that could realistically work. Something like moving the mouse where the cursor/selection is, and sending scrolling events from there.

The lenovo keyboard with its trackpoint and mouse buttons is a kind of solution to this, but IME scrolling is still a PITA as it needs two inputs (switching to scroll mode while moving the trackpoint)

maest 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Before adding the AI summary, google required:

    Tab+tab+enter
to highlight the first link result.

Now, with the summary, it's:

    Tab+tab+enter+tab+tab
Just wild lol