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Disabled controls

Never, ever disable buttons — Why not?

In this article, I’ll explain why you shouldn’t disable buttons and answer the inevitable objections. In a subsequent article, I’ll provide more accessible approaches.

Daniel Berryhill
UX Collective
Published in
9 min readNov 5, 2023

A toy cat with an angry face

Contents

Problems with disabling buttons

In this section, we’ll talk about why disabling buttons is a bad solution for your users, including the lack of communication it promotes and how it cannot be perceived by certain users.

Answering objections

We’ll discuss the more common objections to barring disabled buttons, including WCAG’s stance, special use cases, error prevention, and others.

Conclusion

Links

Problems with disabling buttons

User: “Why is it disabled?” Devs: “That’s your problem.”

There certainly are accessibility issues with disabling buttons (which we’ll get to), but even for those that don’t rely on assistive technology (AT), you’re telling them to take a flyin’ leap.

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Responses (33)

What are your thoughts?

Don't disable buttons ever is obviously an overstatement and/or a clickbait title. There is no such thing as "never" when building software. If it was so, this feature could be simply not provided by operating systems and browsers. There are many…

29

“This button doesn’t work now, and I’m not going to bother telling you if it ever will.”

There ARE ways around this. Some widget sets still allow hover help on a disabled button. If you can’t do that you could put an icon next to the button to hover over. I have been what we now call a UX designer for 35 years in Enterprise Software…

42

I disagree, I don't appreciate definitive point of view just because you believe in it. We always have to consider who are the target users. You can't just force ppl to do page transition just because you think there is usability issue. You don't…

10