A WordPress Bug That Only Affected Left-Handed Users

Here's a delightful piece of web archaeology: a WordPress bug that silently punished left-handed users for seven years. The author of a personal blog discovered that when a left-handed reader scrolled the page using their left thumb, a comment reply box would suddenly appear and interrupt their browsing. Right-handed users never saw it.

The culprit was a touchstart event listener added to link clicks back in 2017. At the time, browsers had a 300ms tap delay on mobile, and firing an event on touchstart was a workaround to make links feel snappy. But that delay was eliminated in Chrome as early as 2013, and by 2015 the FastClick library was already obsolete. The code should have been removed years ago.

Because the reply link sits on the left side of the page, a left-handed user's thumb would naturally land on it while scrolling. The touchstart listener would fire, triggering the comment box. Right-handed users scrolled with their right thumb and never hit the link — so the bug stayed invisible to the developer and most of the audience.

The bug was reported on WordPress Trac in 2017, but sat untouched for seven years. The author finally submitted a fix that simply deleted the offending lines. No grand refactor, no complex regression testing — just removing dead code that had been causing frustration for a subset of users.

This is a textbook example of how accessibility bugs can hide in plain sight. When you only test with your own habits, you miss entire categories of users. The fix was trivial, but finding it required someone outside the developer's own usage pattern to report it — and then wait seven years for someone to care enough to act.

The lesson is boring but important: remove legacy polyfills and workarounds when they're no longer needed. That 2017 touchstart listener was a relic from an era that ended years earlier. It didn't just waste bytes — it actively broke the experience for a non-trivial portion of visitors.