Re: [csswg-drafts] [mediaqueries] Suggestion: "prefers-pointer-location" (#7872)

> Could this idea be expanded to obscure privacy concerns?

Sure! Although it may be worth weighing how this, as you say, does not definitely reveal dominance. Technically even preferring dark mode can reveal a light sensitivity?

> Preferring the placement of "hamburger menus" on the left or right or preferring the placement of scroll bars on the left or right does not _necessarily_ reveal a dominant hand, but targeting other page design features could remove the means to pinpoint the private information.
> 
> There are other page design preferences that can be tied to these decisions as well. Generally speaking, it is easier to hit navigational buttons with your thumb when they are along the bottom of the screen, but I strongly dislike that placement and prefer the navigation to be at the top of the page. What if we had a media query that could adapt pages for those preferences?

Personally, I think many pages would be fine simply mirrored vertically, for users with a left-sided preference. That can be handled with a navigation element side preference. Yet this doesn't address your more general request.

> That could change your values from just `left` and `right` to `top left` or `bottom right`, among others.
> We can reframe the media preference as about a personal choice (like light or dark mode) instead of being strickly about your dominant hand. It still solves the accessibility problem.
> 
> This does sort of snowball the idea into multiple queries and/or many values. What if you want the "hamburger menu" on the left, the scroll bars on the right, and the nav bar at the bottom? That's now 3 different features.
> 
> I think this is worth exploring. It would be a valuable design addition to make websites work according to user preferences without the need for a custom settings panel to toggle these on and off (again, similar to `prefers-color-scheme`).

One issue about this is that it becomes so much more complicated, that I fear it could discourage practical use and implementation. With {left, right, none} × {top, bottom, none}, along with an unspecified/any/default, that's 9 enumerations. How many web developers would even consider handling so many cases, for the marginalised users who prefer anything other than the web page author's default?


-- 
GitHub Notification of comment by Phosra
Please view or discuss this issue at https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/7872#issuecomment-1298868183 using your GitHub account


-- 
Sent via github-notify-ml as configured in https://github.com/w3c/github-notify-ml-config

Received on Tuesday, 1 November 2022 17:27:51 UTC