Accessibility myth: non‑selectable text won't stop scraping
A frontend dev called out the harms of 'non‑selectable text' tricks used on fanfic sites—arguing they break accessibility but don’t prevent scraping or copying argued. The thread is a timely reminder that UI tricks can harm users without delivering the intended protection.
Browser-side “non‑selectable” CSS is trivial to bypass using browser devtools, disabling JavaScript, or simple bookmarklets and [extensions atlassc.net]. Chrome’s copy behavior can still capture or include text that a site marks unselectable, as discussed in a long‑running Stack Overflow thread about Chrome pasting non‑selectable [spans stackoverflow.com]. Public scraping tools targeting fanfic archives exist on GitHub (for example, fanfiction scrapers that parse chapters programmatically) [github.com], and Archive of Our Own (AO3) confirmed its content was included in Common Crawl and asked Common Crawl to stop scraping in December 2022. [transformativeworks.org] AO3’s scale underscores the risk: the site lists roughly 10.33 million registered users and about 17.11 million works on its homepage (March 2026 site snapshot). [archiveofourown.org] Accessibility guidance from practitioners warns that disabling selection breaks workflows for copying error text, using translation or text‑to‑speech tools, and other assistive tasks, with UX posts and accessibility writeups calling user-select: none a trap when applied to content [areas blog.openreplay.com]. AO3’s practical response has focused on server‑side protections—rate limiting, traffic monitoring, and legal advocacy—rather than UI tricks, and the Archive explicitly recommends restricting works to registered users to reduce large‑scale [scraping transformativeworks.org]. Community tools that re‑enable selection—like the “Selectable” Chrome extension that mentions fanfiction.net and user scripts for fanfic sites—show readers actively undoing client‑side blocking in the wild. [chromewebstore.google.com]
