Hidden questions and Shieldfont
Use hidden questions to collect answers from controls that participants normally cannot see. They remain real questions: DOM tools can inspect them, scripts can answer them, and their answers are saved and exported with other answers.
Hide a question
- Open the question in Content.
- Expand its Settings below the answer options.
- At the bottom, choose a method in Hide question.
| Method | Participant rendering |
|---|---|
| Don’t hide | The question appears in its authored position. |
| DOM only | The question is clipped out of sight. Its prompt and answer controls remain in the DOM. |
| Off-screen | The question is positioned outside the visible area. Scrolling cannot reveal it. |
| Under a white panel | An opaque white panel covers the question. |
| White on white | Text, controls and focus indicators have no visible features against the white background. |
Hidden questions are placed after Continue or Submit in the page's DOM. They occupy no visible space and do not extend the scrollable page. Their controls stay enabled and remain in the Tab order. A keyboard or screen-reader user can therefore reach them. An answer to a hidden question is a signal to investigate; it does not establish that a participant is a bot.
A hidden question cannot be Required. Hiding a required question turns Required off. Enabling Required makes a hidden question visible. Studio reports these automatic changes only when the other setting actually changes. The same rule applies to bulk Required changes and synchronized questions.
Hiding does not remove a question from Flow, randomization, answer storage or exports. A question excluded by Flow or a randomized subset is still excluded. Use a stable Question ID if you want to inspect its answer in results or read it in JavaScript.
Check the participant view
Open Preview. Hidden questions are concealed by default, using the selected method. Turn on Show hidden questions to reveal them below Continue with a red dotted outline. Turn it off to restore participant rendering. This control is available only in Preview; participants do not receive it.
Check that the visible page still makes sense without the hidden question. Use Tab from Continue to check the hidden controls, and submit a test answer to confirm that your question behaves as intended. Preview answers do not create participant responses.
Shieldfont
Enable Use Shieldfont in the question's settings to encode its displayed text with a matching font. The font draws readable words while the DOM contains substituted text. It works independently of the hiding method.
Encoding covers question prompts, choice labels, choice tooltips, ordinal values and ordinal button subtitles after text placeholders resolve. It preserves HTML markup and attributes. Input placeholders, participant answers, image descriptions, link URLs and code blocks are not encoded.
Edit protected prompts and choice labels in Content. Preview shows their encoded participant rendering instead of inline text editors.
Shieldfont breaks screen-reader access and can change copy/paste, search and translation. It also changes the question's font. Check the actual participant view before publishing, including the languages and formatting used in your question. A font that fails to load can leave substituted text visible.
Shieldfont does not identify bots by itself. Screenshot readers, OCR and automation that decodes the font can recover the displayed text. Read the Shieldfont integration documentation for its encoding, font and accessibility limits.