this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2026
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This free font can trick AI scrapers into swallowing gibberish instead of your content (www.techspot.com)
submitted 18 hours ago by FTonsilStones@lemmy.ca to c/technology@lemmy.world
44 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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.

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[–] Zarobi@aussie.zone 1 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

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.world 5 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

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.zone 3 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Cricket@lemmy.zip 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

In the US, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) facilitates tons of lawsuits against websites that are not accessible: https://www.rjo.com/publications/website-accessibility-lawsuits-continue-to-inundate-california-courts-despite-covid-19/

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: https://www.ecomback.com/annual-2025-ada-website-accessibility-lawsuit-report