171–174 of 174 posts
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Where do you see the low contrast?
The linked article has a fairly light gray background with white text. I can read it, but the low contrast is just tiresome.
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The main argument against these fonts is that you are removing accessibility for humans permanently in exchange for removing accessibility for scrapers temporarily. It might raise the cost for some scrapers, to some degree, but it raises the cost to, effectively, infinity for anyone who needs to use a screen reader, a browser's 'reader' view, or any other assistive technology. Things like this just remind me of EA's…
So scrapers are using those people as hostages. So let's have something like a HTML meta tag to link to an accessible version of a website and hard jail for using it for scraping. It's not a technical issue, it's a social one, people behave differently given the same set of possibilities and incentives, and we can and should target those who fuck it up for everyone.
If an ISP blocks an entire apartment blocks internet in response to one users activity, it's pretty clear the ISP is holding the neighbors connectivity hostage because they made the move. It's the same thing, except the little guy role happens to be flipped.
Thanks 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…
Regarding shieldfont, if a screen reader can get the real words, then AI scrapers will eventually be able to get them one way or the other... I stand by my points in the post. I guess I'd say if someone uses a lesser-known obfuscation technique that remains uncracked or unnoticed by the bots, then more power to them. But if and when everyone else catches on, it will become useless.
I am very proud of the theme, which originally started out as a bearblog theme but I think by now it's all been replaced with my own CSS. The light color theme consists of the Windows web colors, while the dark theme is modified from the CGA 16-color palette.
I appreciate the feedback from people in this thread. I realize the irony of the blog not necessarily conforming to the ideal of an accessible format, but it's all in plain text and shouldn't be too much trouble for any reader-mode or accessibility tool to parse... I was aware the dark theme needed some more contrast. I just tightened it up a bit by darkening the gray palette value.
Thanks 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…
I had no idea this was even posted on HN until a short while ago, lol Regarding shieldfont, if a screen reader can get the real words, then AI scrapers will eventually be able to get them one way or the other... I stand by my points in the post. I guess I'd say if someone uses a lesser-known obfuscation technique that remains uncracked or unnoticed by the bots, then more power to them. But if and when everyone else c…
On shieldfont, I feel like many posts in this thread are glossing over the point that most scraping operations are operating at scale, and all we have to do is make a piece of content (or many pieces) too expensive to scrape _at that scale_. It's not really about whether AI scrapers could or could not mimic a screen reader well enough in an individual case.
So, require an expensive-enough computation to access the true text, similar to the anti-DDOS measures that gate many full webpages today (admittedly, I'm not well-versed in how these affect scrapers). As annoying as these pages may be - or extra button clicks to "reveal" true text to a screen reader - this seems like a very pro-human space to explore, since it's one mechanism that can affect bots greatly and us individual viewers relatively little.