I'm trying to pay my Virginia income taxes online, and they have disabled paste in any field of consequence. Paste in a password? Nope. Your bank's routing number? You're gonna have to hand-key that. Your bank account number? You better believe you're typing that in.
If you wanted to force people to create crappy passwords and cause them to accidentally siphon money out of strangers' bank accounts, this is how you'd do it. And somebody went to extra effort to make it be like this!
I emailed the Virginia Department of Taxation’s ADA coordinator about their site’s inaccessibility, citing WCAG 2.2 chapter and verse.
This is the response that I got. :(
@waldoj you may want to check out StopTheMadness by @lapcatsoftware
@arensb Having two fields is asinine in the first place. Why not 3?
It's there to catch mistakes by people who cannot accurately *type* a value they know by heart.
This was something that sorta made sense in 1995 because using computers to enter the info was novel and most people were unskilled.
It has become anachronistic.
@raven667 @waldoj Bingo. That’s the heart of the issue right there. The user’s app should serve the user and no one else.
IIRC there was a scandal with Palemoon browser blocking some ads but deliberately not others.
I once reported the bug of browsers showing users a padlock when negotiating SSL with a Cloudflare site no different than any other site, which deceives the user. The user should be informed when there is an obvious partial tunnel (not e2ee). I think it was Tor Project devs who said the browser should serve the webmaster not the user of the browser. They said something like the website should be experienced the way the website intends.
@waldoj because of this I've been using the "Don't F*** With Paste" Chrome extension for a long while.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/nkgllhigpcljnhoakjkgaieabnkmgdkb
Both that I know have no updates for some time:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/don-t-fuck-with-paste/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/absolute-enable-right-click/
@sky Thanks for the tip, although I have explored that and it works. Mostly.
Except for that one time my stubborn ex-employer insisted on using IE-specific sites with ActiveX and BHOs.
@realn2s @waldoj I can think of one: an app that consumes your input for non-text purposes. like in 2048 I don't want accidentally pasting "awawawa" to just instantly move several steps to the corner (potentially losing the game if it is close to being full)
of course, there are definitely better ways to implement this that aren't really "disabling paste" (e.g. not using a text box so paste isn't a thing to begin with) but the lack of paste is important for this type of keyboard input.
as for just text inputs, where "pasting" as an action makes sense? I agree, it should never be disabled.
@realn2s @waldoj The browser can't really tell the difference between "Let me handle this paste programatically, I know better" and "I'm not going to handle this paste at all".
I've had to implement formatted input fields before, and those do need to handle paste themselves.
I do agree that just "disabling paste" is an antifeature, but so is preventing applications from ever implementing custom paste-handling.
This is one of several functions that should never have existed in browsers in the first place.
A browser should not let a website break any part of the browser UI.
@waldoj I agree. Luckily (unless you’re using Google’s Chrome) there’ll always be extensions for that!
https://underpassapp.com/StopTheMadness/test.html is available on Safari and Firefox
@waldoj "Your password must be secure, contain letters number and symbols and not be a recognised word in any language"
Also we've disabled paste so your password manager won't work.
Yes! Its annoying when you use a password app for security so have long complicated passwords and then some clown disables paste on the password or retype password field.
@waldoj Oh, you're one of those weirdos that believe our software should serve the needs of the users?
Oh sweet summer child.
@waldoj and while we're at it, all financial statement PDFs should use real pasteable characters
For example, I might copy what looks like "123.45" from a statement only to find it pastes as ")£_†k-"
@raven667 yes, I know: I was a prepress nerd for some time. Quite why these PDF libraries subset/re-encode text so badly, I will never understand. They will be breaking accessibility requirements.
I used to have to render my bank statements as bitmaps and run OCR on them to make them even slightly searchable
@waldoj any breakage from the basic behavior is bad. I use a site that loves to select a whole paragraph when I double click. Same site also uses an editor implemented in JS that loves to fsckup the clipboard. In the vein of 'name the sin, not the sinner'¹, we're talking about #JIRA and #TinyMCE:
https://github.com/tinymce/tinymce/issues/4182
¹ unless they really deserve it.
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