This sounds awful for accessibility tools such as screen readers.
this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2026
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Typography
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Type design, setting, fonts, etc.
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Story checks out in Gemini
Gemini says:
The text in the image reads:
TAJS GBNFBNCB JS
WKJIYBN JN BBCDY FONT
…but man does it hurt my eyes to read
Wait, do people think robots use OCR to spy on them? They have access to the actual unicode symbols. They know that an A is an A regardless if it's displayed as Arial, Times New Roman or Wing Dings. Is there a subculture somewhere that people only communicate through text as images?
It might be useful in some countries where the prevalent unencrypted messaging app is preventively scanning every single image before actually delivering it to the recipient, and silently dropping it if some forbidden keywords are found
Apparently Pifed blocks images with certain text in it lol
I know this has good intentions but this is pretty much an accessibility nightmare
Just looking at the happy human/sorry robot image, it doesn't work as well if the image is large (at least for me), the outline of the decoy message starts to take visual priority over the real message especially if you don't know what it is. I definitely read sorry robot on first glance with the image at phone's width and didn't realise that's not the actual message until I read the description.
I feel like this can be easily cracked if you downscale it down to only a few pixels per letter. Then the decoy letters get filtered out and the human letters lose their blur