How To View Blurred Text On Websites

How To View Blurred Text On Websites

Decrypting Blurred Text on Websites: When you create an account on a website, they need to safeguard the personal information you provide. This security measure is in place to protect your data from potential misuse, identity theft, or harm. If you come across blurred text while browsing a website, there’s typically a valid purpose behind it.

It’s not meant to inconvenience you or the website owners; rather, it’s a protective measure aimed at enhancing your online safety by thwarting cybercriminals, unidentified individuals, and other malicious actors. Here, we’ll explore methods for deciphering blurred text on websites and delve into how they operate.

Check Your Connection

Some websites will blur text when they detect that your internet connection is slow. However, you can usually remove blurred text easily.

If you’re still unable to read a website after adjusting your Internet connection, try reloading its homepage. When looking at an entire page of blurred text, click on a single word and see if it becomes clear.

Why do websites blur content?

You might be thinking, Why is a website blocking out text? This is very common, and it’s not necessarily because you have done something wrong. If a website blurs part of its content, then it usually indicates that some kind of digital rights management (DRM) is at play. These rights safeguard the distribution and use of particular works.

For example, if you purchase an e-book from Amazon, then you can read it on up to six devices.

What might not be so obvious is why Amazon blurs out text.

When digital books and other content are protected by DRM, they usually have some sort of restriction placed on them, like the maximum number of devices they can be used on or how many times they can be downloaded.

That’s where text obfuscation comes in handy: it makes it difficult for a reader to circumvent these restrictions by copying and pasting portions of content or scanning it into another document.

Try Incognito Window

Most of us are familiar with how our web pages appear in incognito windows, but many don’t know how it’s done. For starters, you can select File > New Incognito Window (or Command + Shift + N on Mac) at any time.

However, we highly recommend taking advantage of browser plugins like The Great Suspender for Chrome and Ghostery for Safari, Firefox, and Internet Explorer.

They do a great job of preventing your browser from auto-loading tabs when you visit a new site. Plus they make it easy to add sites to your blacklist so that they always load in an incognito window without fail.

Why do websites blur content?

One of the most common questions people ask when they encounter blurred text is why websites blur content. There are multiple reasons why a website might want to blur or remove text, and one of them could be copyright.

Copyright-protected images, text, or videos that appear on a website can’t be used without permission from the owner of said media. If you go to a website and some parts are hidden by blurry images, those parts likely contain copyrighted material.

But other reasons may explain blurry sections on websites as well. Some sites, like Amazon, for example, use blurring as an added security measure. The company hides checkout information to prevent theft.

Use Google Translate As A Proxy To View Hidden Text

Google Translate is a viable tool for unblurring text on a web page. Use Google’s Chrome browser and select Google Translate as your default translation source. Then, highlight a section of text on a website that you want to read more clearly.

With your mouse over that text, press Ctrl+Shift+I. This will copy that text into Google Translate and then translate it into another language in real-time.

As you can see, Google Translate is a good way to look at blurry text. For more privacy-centric browser tools, take a look at our list of VPN services.

Use Google Translate as a Proxy to View Hidden Text<This part should talk about – As you can see, Google Translate is a good way to look at blurry text.

Change Your Font Size

If you can’t make out the text on a website because it’s too blurry, try increasing your browser font size. Doing so may reduce blurriness and help you read more easily. Most browsers allow you to increase or decrease the font size by holding down Ctrl + or Ctrl – while pressing one of those two keys. This works in Chrome and Firefox, for example.

On Safari, hold down Ctrl + Shift instead. Make sure that your desktop is set at a reasonable resolution before making changes.

High resolutions can also cause text to appear blurry in some cases (this is more common with text that doesn’t get plenty of vertical spacing). You may also want to adjust your preferences for text smoothing in Windows—it has an impact on blurriness as well.

View A Snapshot On Internet Archive

Not every site saves a snapshot of its website. However, most of them do. When you try and view a page that no longer exists. Internet Archive allows you to see the website as it appears before its removal.

In many cases, viewing a snapshot is much better than just reading about how a website used to look on Wikipedia—or worse, not finding out at all.

You can find out which websites save snapshots by searching Google for [website] archive (where [website] is replaced with what you’re looking for).

Change The Browser Window Width Or Height

By blurring your text, you make it harder for visitors to read and navigate your content. Since eye-tracking studies have found that users tend to skip over everything but headings, the blur will do just that—make people jump right over your blurred copy without reading a word.

It may be tempting, but don’t blur text in an attempt to add motion and interest: all you’ll accomplish is driving readers away.

The answer isn’t blurring your text; it’s making sure it’s readable by picking legible typefaces, using them in large enough sizes, and giving enough line height so that lines are easy to read from to bottom.

Open The Page From Google Search

For websites offering premium content to subscribers, the best solution is to pay for access. For example, websites like The New York Times and others require you to pay $15 per month for full access—not including discounts via a subscription plan (e.g., $120/year)—or else view only a portion of their content. If you want to read a whole story or visit a site often, this can be annoying.

If you’re visiting a news website or other site that offers premium content, one solution is to use Google’s view original option. In many cases, simply searching for something along with viewing the source link will let you view it in its entirety without any blurred text.

View Blurred Content With Inspect Element

The Inspect or Inspect Element tool is available in all desktop web browsers. Just right-click anywhere on a webpage and select Inspect from the context menu that appears.

Once you do, your developer tools should open in a new tab. You can also use Ctrl + Shift + I or Command + Option + I as keyboard shortcuts.

If Inspect Element is still not working, your account may have been suspended from using it. This can happen when companies detect excessive amounts of bot traffic coming from a specific IP address.

In these cases, you’ll need to use a VPN service to access the inspect element. There are free and paid options available, such as TunnelBear, Betternet, and NordVPN. If you’re unsure how VPNs work or don’t have one yet, here’s an in-depth guide for using one with Inspect Element.

A Few Things To Note For View Blurred Text On Websites

In some browsers, the Inspect tool may not be visible if you haven’t enabled the developer tools first. To do so, open a new tab and go to Tools > Developer Tools.

Once the developer tools are open, the Inspect tool should appear in your list of options along with Code and Style Editor. If it’s not visible here or you can’t see it at all, make sure you meet the browser requirements below and then relaunch Chrome or Safari.

If your browser doesn’t include a view source option or you prefer not to use it, you can usually find a code editor as part of your browser. You’ll generally find it by going to Tools > Developer Tools. In Chrome, for example, click Inspect (the camera icon) to see page elements and their underlying code side-by-side.

To look at specific parts of your website’s code in greater detail—for example, if you’re wondering why you don’t see any images appear even though they exist—click and drag around with your mouse while looking at elements on the screen.

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