Re:Ask HN: Did Facebook just stop fighting adblockers?
by duskwuff on Tuesday August 16, 2022 @03:31AM
(#32480179)
Ad blockers were identifying Facebook content as ads by looking for the text "sponsored". For a while, Facebook was fighting this by scrambling that text in ways that would definitely have tripped up a screen reader (e.g. inserting extra hidden letters, reordering letters, etc).
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Re:Ask HN: Did Facebook just stop fighting adblockers?
by bryanrasmussen on Tuesday August 16, 2022 @04:51AM
(#32480625)
they could also have put the sponsored message into an aria hidden div then the screen readers would be safe. Not difficult to separate out things that mess up automated solutions and screen readers from each other.
Re:Ask HN: Did Facebook just stop fighting adblockers?
by Yiin on Tuesday August 16, 2022 @07:30AM
(#32481485)
that would defeat the purpose of the obfuscation, as whatever screen reader can easily read so can userscript.
Re:Ask HN: Did Facebook just stop fighting adblockers?
by bryanrasmussen on Wednesday August 17, 2022 @02:34PM
(#32500010)
first off I suppose there can be lots of different places where aria-hidden would be used. So it might be really silly for userscript to strip out aria-hidden areas.
So then you use aria-hidden on your area with the obfuscated Sponsored text in it. Userscript still needs to handle it just as much as before, and the screen reader is free from dealing with it.
at any rate there is no real connection between these two technologies and if FB wanted to keep something from screen readers but still force userscripts to have to work to figure out what to do about them there would be thousands of ways to make that the case.