RE: https://mastodon.online/@mwichary/117057050584934143
Ah. So, we couldn't be bothered making the web #accessible for disabled people.
But we *could* be bothered making it accessible to (sic) AI.
Then we decided we could block AI by making the web even more inaccessible for people with vision impairments.
Cool. Cool, cool.
@se_davidobrien yeah accessibility was my first thought too. ShieldFont has this horrible explanation of how it's ok:
The real words remain sealed in the page, and the reader’s browser uncovers them by solving a compute-heavy puzzle. It requires JavaScript and a few seconds of processing, more than most mass scrapers are willing to spend. This makes the content available to most screen readers, translators, and copy/paste, but there is still room to improve and make it instantly available.
@se_davidobrien yeah, this is progress... a compute heavy puzzle that takes seconds of processing to... read plain text.
Aug 11, 2026, 10:05 PM@se_davidobrien Also, not to be a complete party-pooper, but bots almost definitely don't actually look at the text as rendered in the font on a web page, so it's really just people patting themselves on the back for making life more difficult for people with visual impairments...