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This is off topic a bit, and not a criticism of this library or its authors, but: I do think that DnD is bad for accessibility. Especially on mobile, where it's much harder to precisely click, so the deadzone required to distinguish a click from a drag has to be much larger.

But whether it's on a mouse, trackpad, touchscreen, trackpoint, or other more esoteric system, it requires a muscle hold while doing a precise movement along another axis. And this can be more difficult and RSI-inducing. God help you if you're trying to drag on a resistive touchscreen where more force is required, too.

I feel that the copy-paste workflow of pick source -> copy -> pick destination -> paste is actually easier (and much more prevalent!) than pick -> hold AND move -> drop. It also works better in windowed systems because you can more easily interact with the window system while "holding" the thing; this is often impossible or more difficult while using DnD and having to hold down the primary button.

(some drawing tools actually recognize this by having different tools/cursors for "select items" and "move item(s)". The old Acorn Archimedes used a different mouse button (middle) reserved for DnD. I feel it could work well with a stylus with a button too. But in both those cases I would prefer "click to pick up, click to drop" to holding.)




To avoid strain and accuracy requirements, iOS (and I imagine Android) support Accessibility extensions targeting drag motions - See Accessibility/Touch/AssistiveTouch.

It seems fair to have the logical gesture of a drag be provided accessibility support on a per-device basis. To the extent that any UI library is written in terms of underlying mouse clicks and locations, it would interfere with that support. So the real question is whether the UI library support for DnD can be managed using device accessibility.


Totally agree - that drag and drop is over-rated.

The only area I think where drag and drop has an advantage is if you want to be precise about where you drop and thus realtime feedback about where it will drop is useful.

ie drag and drop effectively adds a mode while you are dragging - and as such you can have mode sensitive UI feedback that operates only in that mode - not so easy with cut and paste - the UI doesn't know you are about to paste.




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