(He's broken mainstream browsers, too - ctrl+f doesn't work in the page.)

GPT 5.2 extracted the correct text, but it definitely struggled - 3m36s, and it had to write a script to do it, and it messed up some of the formatting. It actually found this thread, but rejected that as a solution in the CoT: "The search result gives a decoded excerpt, which seems correct, but I’d rather decode it myself using a font mapping."

I doubt it would be economic to decode unless significant numbers of people were doing this, but it is possible.

It's a proof of concept, and maybe a starting point for somebody else who wants to tackle this problem.

Can LLMs detect and decode the text? Yes, but I'd wager for the case that data cleaning doesn't happen to the extent that it decodes the text after scraping.

I suppose I don’t know data ingestion that well. Is de-obfuscating really something they do? If I was maintaining such a pipeline and found the associated garbage data, I doubt I’d bother adding a step for the edge case of getting the right caesar cipher to make text coherent. Unless I was fine-tuning a model for a particular topic and a critical resource/expert obfuscated their content, I’d probably just drop it and move on.

That said, after watching my father struggle deeply with the complex computer usage his job requires when he developed cataracts, I don’t see any such method as tenable. The proverbial “fuck you” to the disabled folks who interact with one’s content is deeply unacceptable. Accessible web content should be mandatory in the same way ramps and handicap parking are—if not more-so. For that matter, it shouldn’t take seeing a loved one slowly and painfully lose their able body to give a shit about accessibility. Point being, you’re right to be pissed and I’m glad this post had a direct response from somebody with direct personal experience needing accessible content so quickly after it went up.