Fwd: on-page controls considered bad practice?

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Mit freundlichen Grüßen

Marc Haunschild
https://Accessibility.Consulting


Anfang der weitergeleiteten Nachricht:

Von: Marc Haunschild <haunschild@mhis.onmicrosoft.de>
Datum: 9. März 2021 um 15:17:18 MEZ
An: Tobias Bengfort <tobias.bengfort@posteo.de>
Betreff: Aw: on-page controls considered bad practice?

As gar as I know, there are people who like them and people that don’t.
I won’t tell a lot about the pros, because they’re quite obvious. Just one thing: they can be especially helpful for inexperienced users, that do not know a lot about there browser (not even that it is a browser - there still are users calling the browser “the internet”). So never underestimate the support that some people need.

Anyway I also don’t like these kind of buttons, because the can do less than the browsers can do, they might confuse especially the people you want to support with these or unexperienced just don’t understand, what the symbols (normally there is no explaining visible text) will do.

For these people, for experienced users, for blind people they’re just “noise” or clutter, that makes the user interface more complicated and take some valuable real estate.

For about 15 years already I encourage everybody with a website to offer a single help “button” instead, that technically is a link to a page where things like browser zoom, cmd + f, holding the cmd or shift key while clicking on links and other helpful things are explained, to spread the word (of the tools that every browser comes with).

In my opinion this is still the best compromise.

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Mit freundlichen Grüßen

Marc Haunschild
https://Accessibility.Consulting


Am 09.03.2021 um 14:44 schrieb Tobias Bengfort <tobias.bengfort@posteo.de>:

Hi,

I often see websites that have on-page controls for things that can already be control via browser settings, e.g. font-face, font-size, light/dark theme etc. I recently even discovered an on-page screen reader.

While these controls are not harmful by themselves I consider them red flags because they could imply that the designers were not aware of the native controls. I usually give the feedback that I consider these controls unnecessary. But I have never seen any authoritative guidelines on this topic.

Do you know of any regulations or articles on that topic? Am I right in discouraging these controls or are there valid usecases?

thanks
tobias