alt Hacker NewsThanks 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 exactly that. Screen review and touch exploration are untested. ShieldFont hides shielded passages from accessibility tools by default with aria-hidden="true", because a decoy read aloud is fluent, grammatical, wrong English, and that is worse than silence.
> The real words remain sealed in the same page, and a visible notice above the block carries the control that uncovers them. It is on by default and reachable by mouse, keyboard and screen reader alike. Pressing it sets the reader’s browser to solving a compute-heavy puzzle: JavaScript and a few seconds of processing, more than most mass scrapers are willing to spend. That puts the words within reach of a screen reader, a translator and copy/paste.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. Also just aside, love this TUI-esque blog design and color palette (maybe a bearblog theme? still worth an upvote)
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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.
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.