The irony of championing accessibility using low-contrast simulated VGA text...
Where do you see the low contrast?
Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful
51–60 of 174 posts
Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful
#52Thanks for introducing me to shieldfont.org! It's the first of these I've seen that feels designed to be more than a visual experiment, reading through their landing page is interesting. In particular, their section on accessibility seems to contradict this post's opening premise: > Screen readers get the real words. A screen reader reading down the page is never handed scrambled text, and our NVDA test asserts exact…
When you look at their live demo (https://shieldfont.org/demo/), it says: If you use a screen reader, custom font, or translator, please uncover the text before reading.
They also actively block copying the text, telling you to "uncover" the text first. The uncover operation is VERY expensive.
Anyone using assistive technologies or trying to copy "protected" text is SOL.
Search engines will index the decoy. You'll get no traffic. Their solution is basically putting yourself in a black hole.
Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful
#53DRM for your eyes == garbage idea.
Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful
#54Is there evidence shieldfont doesn't work?
It only works while it's rare. If it was more common, scrapers would switch to OCR or simply reverse the font so they can decode the ligatures. Their own whitepaper brings up a bigger issue: if it works, it poisons search engines as well.
OCR is a more expensive option, right? I don't think these fonts need to stop ai from being trained; I think they just need to make it more expensive and difficult.
Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful
#55Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful
#56Not trynna to be funny. The author's post is anti-human, thus useless and harmful (medically). I can't read this bad font, sizing, spacing, etc. The main offender is the color choice, and fonts that are just god aweful to read.
Accessibility is important, and I find that "Reader Mode" in most browsers is quite good. Everyone should have access to the tools to consume content. Did your browser not provide that functionality?
basically make it look hard to read for the majority for the sake of 1%?
let those 1% use a diff tool view instead of 99% of us having to suffer.
That website no-way is accessible for my 30 year old eyes.
Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful
#57Thanks for introducing me to shieldfont.org! It's the first of these I've seen that feels designed to be more than a visual experiment, reading through their landing page is interesting. In particular, their section on accessibility seems to contradict this post's opening premise: > Screen readers get the real words. A screen reader reading down the page is never handed scrambled text, and our NVDA test asserts exact…
When you look at their live demo ( https://shieldfont.org/demo/ ), it says: If you use a screen reader, custom font, or translator, please uncover the text before reading. They also actively block copying the text, telling you to "uncover" the text first. The uncover operation is VERY expensive. Anyone using assistive technologies or trying to copy "protected" text is SOL. Search engines will index the decoy. You'll…
Isn't this the same sort of cost CloudFlare and anime catgirls are making us pay daily? Only enough to deter bots, or "a few seconds processing."
I take your point that one extra click/interaction required for screen readers only is objectively more friction, but it's only by exploring these technologies instead of dismissing them that we'll arrive at UX solutions truly work for people of all stripes (and ideally, not for bots, scrapers, and the like). I think if you're applying a tool like this you already have very different priorities than fueling Google.
Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
When you look at their live demo ( https://shieldfont.org/demo/ ), it says: If you use a screen reader, custom font, or translator, please uncover the text before reading. They also actively block copying the text, telling you to "uncover" the text first. The uncover operation is VERY expensive. Anyone using assistive technologies or trying to copy "protected" text is SOL. Search engines will index the decoy. You'll…
Isn't this the same sort of cost CloudFlare and anime catgirls are making us pay daily? Only enough to deter bots, or "a few seconds processing." I take your point that one extra click/interaction required for screen readers only is objectively more friction, but it's only by exploring these technologies instead of dismissing them that we'll arrive at UX solutions truly work for people of all stripes (and ideally, no…
As soon as you need to put a "decode" button for accessibility functions to work, you're effectively posting the key along with the cipher. It's self-defeating because any tool that supports screen readers will also support scraping. It's a fool's errand.
Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful
#59Thanks for introducing me to shieldfont.org! It's the first of these I've seen that feels designed to be more than a visual experiment, reading through their landing page is interesting. In particular, their section on accessibility seems to contradict this post's opening premise: > Screen readers get the real words. A screen reader reading down the page is never handed scrambled text, and our NVDA test asserts exact…
It's funny, I was just thinking that the one thing I hate most about the terminal is that its monospaced fonts and overly-long lines are a nightmare for reading. So the fact that somebody designed a blog reading experience to mimic this is just… ugh for me.
But you seem to appreciate it, and I'm sure others do too. Different strokes for different folks.
Re: Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
It only works while it's rare. If it was more common, scrapers would switch to OCR or simply reverse the font so they can decode the ligatures. Their own whitepaper brings up a bigger issue: if it works, it poisons search engines as well.
OCR is a more expensive option, right? I don't think these fonts need to stop ai from being trained; I think they just need to make it more expensive and difficult.
It's slightly more expensive, but the cost would be worth it if this became common. It's not designed to be hard to OCR, it's designed to be hard to copy out of the source code, so it doesn't require a very advanced OCR system (and all the regions that would need OCR-ing are clearly marked).