Do you have any real-world examples of commonly used screen readers that can't handle JavaScript? Screen readers gets its content from the DOM in a browser, so if the browser is able to put it in the DOM, it should be available to the screen reader.
98.4% of screen reader users in a 2010 survey (http://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey3/#javascript) had JavaScript enabled.
And if a screen reader can see the data, so can the scrapper.
AJAXification could make it much easier. GET -> json import.
Exactly what I was thinking. Heck, I've scraped using fake AJAX requests even when a legitimate API was available, simply because opening up firebug was faster than reading the API docs.
Re:Preventing Site Scraping
by jamesaguilar on Thursday May 17, 2012 @07:01PM
(#3989568)
This is exactly what I used for my project to scrape Path of Exile item data.
Ha! I did the same for KoL once upon a time.
Well, unless you're visually impaired and using a screen reader... and it doesn't really complicate things for any halfway dedicated scraper, as your AJAX pagination requests probably follow the same predictable pattern as the non-AJAX ones would've.