A number of people have been contacting me since I noted the awful new low contrast text in the new Google Blogs, mentioning that they could no longer copy text from the blog pages to paste onto blank pages as ordinary easily visible fonts.
Many people use text copying as a fallback method for viewing otherwise difficult to read or unreadable pages, as a “lowest common denominator” method that usually always works — even when various page reading add-ons break due to layout changes.
In the case of the new Google Blogs, at least on some platforms, Google’s fancy new low contrast pages also include various tricks that cause some users’ left-mouse-click copy text command that they’ve been using forever to now fail. There are a couple of approaches to dealing with this.
As a general rule, disabling JavaScript on offending pages of these sorts (not just on Google pages) will help, though this can be tricky for some users and can sometimes have serious undesirable operational side-effects.
If your goal is only to copy out text after selecting it (and yes, selecting still works on the new Google Blogs), the pretty much standardized Control-C keyboard shortcut will usually copy the selected text into your clipboard, and you can then past it out onto another page using the regular mouse paste command (or the Control-V keyboard shortcut).
Of course, none of this would be necessary if Google hadn’t joined this bizarre design craze sweeping the Net and making webpages ever more unreadable for ever more users, with a hopelessly narrow-minded “one size fits all, form over function” philosophy.
But you’ll need to talk to Google about that. I’ve already done so — to no useful effect. Perhaps you’ll have better luck than I have. But I won’t be holding my breath.
–Lauren–
I have consulted to Google, but I am not currently doing so — my opinions expressed here are mine alone.
– – –
The correct term is “Internet” NOT “internet” — please don’t fall into the trap of using the latter. It’s just plain wrong!