I actually wrote the code to make this work with screen readers, back when I worked for Kindle in 2018.
I even got to test it out with a few Amazon employees who were blind, which was a really cool experience!
We added some hidden divs which had the plaintext version for screenreaders. For whatever reason, upper management was ok with the plaintext being scrapable, as long as the formatted version couldn't be scraped.
> For whatever reason, upper management was ok with the plaintext being scrapable, as long as the formatted version couldn't be scraped.
I guess it’s either “formatted version is slightly better and typesetting is hard to get right” or “well we’ll have plausible deniability in case publishers ask us where’s our DRM”. Probably both. Still doesn’t make a lot of sense to me though.
Thanks for sharing!