The site says explicitly that they have screen-reader friendly options, but now i wonder how is this implemented to differenciate between the AI crawlers passing as screen readers and real screen readers
Comment on Open source project fools AI scrapers with poisoned font
dfyx@lemmy.helios42.de 1 month ago
Yeah, because fuck accessibility, right?
jherazob@beehaw.org 1 month ago
Cethin@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
One option would be to have this as the default, but have a toggle for an accessibility mode, but the accessibility has to go through something like Anubis that shields the site from bots.
StitchInTime@piefed.social 1 month ago
It’s amazing how many people who work in web are clueless about WCAG. Screen readers weren’t even an afterthought here.
kbobabob@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
Why couldn’t a screen reader still work if the words that are on the screen are the correct ones? Does a screen reader not actually read the screen?
dfyx@lemmy.helios42.de 1 month ago
It (usually) does not, at least not for websites. Reading the screen would require a lot of computing power and be prone to mistakes, especially with unusual fonts and noisy backgrounds.
Instead, screen readers read a website‘s HTML source code which also gives the developer the chance to annotate how certain elements should be read. Accessibility on the web has been a huge topic for years and serving obfuscated HTML that only works for seeing users goes against everything we have been fighting for.
kbobabob@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
It seems with today’s computer power we could do it, but I understand accessibility needs to work for everyone. I wish I had a better solution.