A Brazilian creative studio called Seneda & Abrucio has teamed up with Playtype, a Copenhagen-based type foundry, to build something that doesn't rely on asking nicely to...

Most mass scrapers, on the other hand, simply grab the raw HTML underneath. ShieldFont exploits this difference through an automated process called OpenType glyph substitution.

That said, because the whole defense rests on scrapers reading code rather than screens, taking a screenshot of a shielded page and running OCR on the image can still recover the real words.

Screen readers used by blind readers also work from the code, so they read the decoys aloud. ShieldFont ships with a beta feature that provides those readers with the real text instead.

  • ViatorOmnium@piefed.socialEnglish
    73·
    20 hours ago

    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.

    • Zarobi@aussie.zoneEnglish
      18·
      19 hours ago

      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.
        • Zarobi@aussie.zoneEnglish
          21·
          17 hours ago

          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.

          • cley_faye@lemmy.worldEnglish
            8·
            16 hours ago

            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).

            • Zarobi@aussie.zoneEnglish
              4·
              16 hours ago

              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.

    • cley_faye@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      16 hours ago

      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.

    • Sims@lemmy.mlEnglish
      5·
      19 hours ago

      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…