are accessiblity and anti-scrapabality mutually exclusive?

Question

I want to make a site that is both difficult to screen-scrap and accessible.

Is that an oxymoron?

Answer 1

Most likely. Accessibility relies on tools that parse the underlying code. For example the table "summary" attribute, or more common, the "alt" attribute on the img tag. In addition, these tools may interpret the code in ways that may not be as straight-forward as this.

So, if a site is accessible is somewhat the same as saying that the underlying code is easily parseable. And, consequently, if it's parseable, it can easily be scraped.

So, yes, you could say it's an oxymoron.

Answer 2

Depends on how you envision "accessible". You can make a site with Java Applets, Flash, or Silverlight that can be very difficult to scrape (so long as you don't pass raw data around in the background to be captured), and they can still be fairly usable to most users, but such setups are usually unfriendly to vision impaired browsers, or low bandwidth connections.

You can refer to this posting for some other ideas.