3 ms·

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 ev

by ayaros 1mo ago

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.

evnp 1mo ago
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.

by ayaros 1mo ago

evnp 1mo ago

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.