Thinking more about it, even if the mapping would be generated dynamically (let’s say you could generate them secretly on your server), the scraper could just parse the font file and reverse lookup the words.

does this also block blind people who depend on an e-reader?

Per the article, yes:

Screen readers used by blind readers also work from the code, so they read the decoys aloud.

But:

ShieldFont ships with a beta feature that provides those readers with the real text instead.

ShieldFont ships with a beta feature that provides those readers with the real text instead.

AI scrappers will just pretend to be screen readers then.

And if the approach becomes popular they will just OCR the text instead.

It is also very easy to detect surprising text by looking at the perplexity levels by feeding it to a very small model. If there’s a problem, OCR/‘screen read’ it instead…

Per the GitHub:

Accessibility layer: <Shield> hides protected regions from assistive tech and ships an a11y prop that renders a real alternative beside them — mode: “text” puts your words in the page encrypted behind a time-lock puzzle the reader’s browser opens (no link for a scraper to follow, no artifact for you to host), or mode: “audio” points at a recording you make. What remains: NVDA and JAWS verification (VoiceOver is done by hand, Windows is not), the focus indicator a sighted keyboard user loses to an invisible control, and the non-React tiers shipping none of it.

In summary, they have two ways to get around this.

• By default, blind people are fucked as usual. Most everything is unusable via screen reader just due to the way modern websites are designed.
• Audio mode pre-records an audio file of your text, and plays that, bypassing the screen reader. This is extremely horrible UX for screen readers, for anything more complicated than a wall of text, but at least it’s something.
• Text mode will do some sort of computational challenge, using CPU on the blind person’s machine for a few seconds, then revealing the original unmolested text. Assuming this works properly, because screen readers are extremely fragile beasts.

Sounds like an overly convoluted way to do exactly what Anubis does…

Yeah, if you care about screen reader users, functionally it’s just “Anubis but worse”. Unfortunately, most people don’t care, so for them and all visual users, it has the benefit of no additional “load time” computational check — the page appears instantly without the Anubis step. Though I’m not sure how long it takes the page to do the de-scrambling.

The primary purpose of this project is to mutilate your HTML so bots can’t scrape it, rather than preventing bot traffic in the first place. The screen reader stuff is a bolt-on.

Unfortunately, most people don’t care

There are laws about accessibility, at least for public websites, and probably for larger websites as they have such a large audience that disability can’t be ignored (as much).

In my experience, those laws aren’t followed much in reality. The biggest sites, sure, but most smaller sites are a mess under the hood. As long as something is “technically usable”, even if very awkward and annoying, it’s often hard to sue or anything like that. Maybe it’s different in other countries though, I live in Australia.

Next time you use a website, try only using your keyboard to navigate it and accomplish your task, and you’ll see what I mean. It’s a rough test of how much they value accessibility. For example, many websites disable the border around what you’re highlighting, so you have no idea what the tab button is about to click. Or popup windows don’t actually change your tab selection, so you have to tab through literally the entire page in the background to get to the popup window. Stuff like that; technically usable but annoying as hell.

In the US, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) facilitates tons of lawsuits against websites that are not accessible: rjo.com/…/website-accessibility-lawsuits-continue…

Typically, in website accessibility lawsuits, a visually impaired Plaintiff will allege that a company’s website is inaccessible and incompatible with screen-reading software such that the individual is denied full and equal access to the company’s website in violation of the ADA and the Unruh Act. In these cases, a Plaintiff will seek statutory damages, injunctive relief, and attorney’s fees both individually and on behalf of a class of persons similarly situated. Plaintiffs have been testing this theory of ADA liability in courts across the country for years, with New York, Florida and California being the most active.

Edit: here’s another good link showing a graph of the number of ADA website accessibility lawsuits from 2016 to 2025: ecomback.com/annual-2025-ada-website-accessibilit…

That sounds nice. Wish we had an ADA, wouldn’t even need to change the acronym lol

You do! It’s the DDA (Disability Discrimination Act). A famous case is Maguire v SOCOG 2000 over the Olympic website. Also Coles got sued in 2014.

I always used to quietly rebel against my boss when I did web development work. I’d spend the time making the pages actually accessible to screen readers and tab navigation and such. Even fixing my coworkers’ code to be compliant.

I always thought it was a fun minigame, and it didn’t even take that long. Little things like, icon buttons also need a text label, tabbing needs to follow a logical layout, shortcuts to jump to different parts of the page, actual tables and description lists.

I used to get in a lot of trouble for “wasting time” because “no blind people are using our software.” Years later an audit happens and my boss is shitting himself. We get a passing grade for accessibility. I never got any recognition for it, but he stopped yelling at me for wasting time after that and just let me do my thing.

AI scrappers will just pretend to be screen readers then

There’s a fair chance they’re already doing that. It provides better insight on the content, less formatting to handle, and even visual stuff gets text alternatives.

it does, unless the reader has an OCR mode of sorts

Presumably the AI scraper would also have OCR, and would sidestep things like this?

A scraper has many more ways around something like sheildfont than just OCR. The question will be if it was actually programmed to check for such measures.

Yes, the decoy text is marked aria-hidden, so it won’t be read out loud. The real text is sent to the browser encrypted, and the decryption process takes ~20 seconds, roughly the same as running ocr.

screen reader, SEO, indexation, in page search, etc.

Basically, it breaks everything except people… unless they block/substitute fonts for accessibility reasons, in which case fuck people too.

This is a terrible idea, and it won’t even achieve it’s original “purpose” as it is trivially detectable. Only negatives in this.

they really cooked with that video, got me more excited than with most trailers

I want a “please be patient, student driver” sticker that tells the surveillance systems to drop tables.

If the underlying text says one thing but the font makes it appear to say something else, which version does the author own the copyright to?

Who cares if gibberish text is copyrighted? Putting your work in a funky text doesn’t make what you wrote no longer copyrighted.

Say someone else takes the visual result of the font’s output and re-posts it as plain text.

If anyone searches for that text, their version will come up as the first (and only) published version. Anyone who tries to reference it will cite their version instead of yours. You’d have to convince the court that a clearly different text you published earlier is really the same thing, as long as you view it with a special font that magically transforms it into the text you’re trying to claim—the judge would just as likely think you’re a copyright troll.

I’m not sure who told you posting things online is how you prove copyright, but it’s not.

You entirely sidestepped the scenario and issue. In the example given, the copyrighted work is being produced directly onto a medium that obfuscates its provenance, literally. Yet, gives an opening for another to publish it in such a way, that they could claim it’s their copyrighted work. They would be lying, and they would be wrong, but then you would have to prove to a body composed of ancient mummies who uphold an ancient code, why one of the few ways they thought they understood technology and codified into their verification process, isn’t actually showing them the truth this time. Do you know how to defend a copyright claim?

The human readable text. Copyright applies to the actual content not to how it’s stored or encoded.

Someone needs to tell Sxan about this

White knights already complain about screen readers being too stupid to interpret Thorns, while simultaneously claiming Thorns don’t fool AI because it’s trivial for software to replace it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I can’t imagine þe sort of hate I’d get from using homography.

Both things are true. I don’t understand why you think thats a gotcha of some kind.

DRM is suddenly popular and people think it will work this time.

I bet you could even get some foaming-at-the-mouth anti-AI activists to endorse Israel’s right to resist if Israel decides to ban all AI. Worth a thought, Bibi.

What a laughable strawman from a coglover. On the contrary LLM lovers will happily give money to techbro oligarchs who directly supports Trump and Israel. They will also eagerly burn down the planet just for the sake of some sloppy code.

Clanker wankers will invent just about anything to convince others they are correct. Just like their sloppy overlords.

I want to follow that project. The only thing that I don’t like is how heavily reliant the person who runs the github is on AI-gen

Normally, I don’t really care about it because I know that it’s something that is just a part of the industry now, but they’re using it even on their responses to people on the issue requests, and it’s to the point where it’s hurting my head trying to read it due to how drawn out and detailed it ends up being.

It’s really hard to follow along a project where something as simple as someone opening an issue about how it doesn’t work with screen readers turns into a multi paragraph essay about the project and possibilities on how it works.

Download from where?

Probably starts with https://

If this gets any adoption, it will work for about a week, after which scrapers will just detect the font, and do a reverse lookup of its mapping table.

Ironic that the repo of the font is also AI slop. If the author had asked any competent person how viable the solution is, instead of a sycophantic AI, they would have just gotten a laugh instead.

My thoughts exactly. And so the arms race continues.

Nah. Gregg Shorthand Anniversary Edition is practically indecipherable to AI.

It uses human intuition heavily.

And if you ask an AI to be critical, it’ll also tell you why this is useless lol.

A terrible idea that will hinder everyone and not serve it’s original purpose in a flash.

• anything that parse the page is broken, this includes screen reader, but also indexing, searching, and people that replace fonts locally for accessibility or other reasons
• the “solution” for accessibility is pure trash
• it can be trivially detected and reversed. I suspect LLM would be incredibly better at adapting to this than anything done manually too

It’s basically a kid playing with “encrypshun” client-side, giving both the cipher and the key to the client and hoping it’ll work. Or, as other put it, DRM that don’t work for any of its original purpose, but create an additional layer of complexity and missing features, a common trend in modern projects.

Speaking of flash, serving your content in Flash keeps scrapers at bay

/hj don’t do that, it does work though!

Learn shorthand. AI can’t read it. Gregg Shorthand Anniversary Edition is practically indecipherable to AI. And it allows you to write at up to 300 wpm.

If it were to become popular enough, AI would learn.

The problem with that is that shorthand relies a lot on abbreviations: B = Be or By. But, at the end of a word, it can be ble, like tab. J can be J, or -age. A uses a single dot. So does -ing.

Because of that, I’m curious whether it would catch on or not.

Protection through obfuscation is not real protection. This has been an ongoing thing in the security world and is especially relevant for software. All obfuscation does is protect you from script kiddies (which AI isnt) and make the actual process slower for legitimate users. Like all DRM it only really hurts the people legitimately using your software.

This isn’t about securing sites or content. It is just for poisoning the data AI scrapers steal by obfuscating the readily accessible information.

If you read the article or the ShieldFont website, it works pretty well when you use their React widget, even from an accessibility stand point.

JUST USE ANUBIS

lol anus bi

(love Anubis, have it fronting my client’s websites)

When is Anubis useful (eg vs CloudFlare)? The GitHub page doesn’t say much-

In most cases, you should not need this and can probably get by using Cloudflare to protect a given origin. However, for circumstances where you can’t or won’t use Cloudflare, Anubis is there for you.