Comment by evnp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by evnp | Hacker News Reader

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 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)

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.

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.

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.

Accessibility isn't optional, so what do you propose?

I propose using the internet the way it was designed: Open and readable by everything (including bots). Scraping is a legal issue. There is no technical prevention mechanism that isn't theater.

> Scraping is a legal issue.

The problem is... it's a legal issue we cannot solve. America and China are large enough to not give a fuck about what everyone else wants.

A better technical solution imo is more P2P hosting -- say content addressing. Something designed to deal with the scrapers -- and maybe even make them bear infrastructure costs.

> Search engines will index the decoy. You'll get no traffic. Their solution is basically putting yourself in a black hole.

It's only search engines? And who uses those anymore anyway? Other bots?

It doesn't affect organic traffic, so you are not really putting yourself into a black hole. A lot of website are driven by social media and organic traffic, so they would be just fine with this approach.

Same thoughts. The black hole concerns are overstated for personal stuff when nothing is at stake. Planning to adopt one of the fonts and see how it goes.

Fortunately, the live demo doesnt work for me on Firefox mobile. I can see the text and copy/paste without "uncover".

Not sure if that's due to ublock or one of the font settings in ff.

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 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.

Be proud of the theme. It emanates unflashy nostalgia to me, like a mysterious text-adventure game you discover as a kid. I'm all for putting weight in accessibility as a goal, but never as the all-over riding goal, and always with the greater purpose of the work in mind. It brings to mind an a11y evaluation a recent company I was a part of had done by a 3rd party, where one of the resulting "guidelines" was to darken borders around all our inputs and buttons for better contrast. These had the effect of decimating the visual texture and readability of each page, as you were caught up in a sea of near-black borders on light background. But the design team felt it was a worthy tradeoff, can't say no to accessibility. In other words, for a personal blog, I'd say do what brings you joy first and foremost. It's hard enough doing work you end up feeling proud of.

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.

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.

A bit ironic that this is written in idiomatic Claudese.

Yeah, Shieldfont's Github shows that it is being made with Claude as well, so it'll be a non-starter for those who are dogmatically anti-AI.

Their stance appears to be "[t]his is not an anti-AI font. AI is in our lives. We are actually a pro-consent font." (https://github.com/isaqueseneda/shieldfont/issues/2) Might be a bit more niche market.

> I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.

“Claude: make the scraper mimic a screen reader.”

And just like that, in 10 seconds, their site feeds my “screen reader” the real words.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com