I don't know if this is this is the same font that was going around before buy accessibility advocates quickly flagged it didn't work with screen readers. Logically if a screenreader can read to a human, a scrapper would be able to read it. So this approach is probably a non starter.

Worth noting that the linked GitHub repo is full of commits from Claude

I saw headlines about this before and ignored it, but actually reading the page this time I see that it's much more sophisticated than I expected, especially the part about having a mechanism to locally unlock for accessibility with a compute cost.

Please, no, let's not do this.

Even if it wasn't made by Claude, take a moment to think about what this does to blind users and other users who rely on screen readers who disable JavaScript for whatever reason (and there are legitimate reasons).

Besides, this technique is not novel. Amazon does it to scramble their ebooks, and a random guy broke it in a couple weekends. Considering AI bros are already breaking Anubis, it's not a stretch to say they'd break this in no time flat.

Like every other DRM scheme on Earth, it harms legitimate users while doing nothing to stop the people it's supposed to stop.

is this just css trickery?

Anything a screenreader can use a bot can use. Killing bots via text kills screen readers necessarily, no? How do you know a bot isnt using screen reader tech?