is a negative text-indent considered cloaking

Question

While hiding the corresponding actual text showing  a text-image to the user is a method I learned and I use the negative-text-indent technique. In this way, the user sees the fancy styled text while search engines can still index it. I am serving different content to the user vs the spider does this sound like cloaking and is this method safe for SEO?

Answer 1

It's not cloaking and you are not serving different content, based on whether (you think) the client is a crawler. It's just the content you are posting is interpreted differently by browsers than by a spider. Screen readers will still pick up on the hidden text, text browsers will show it normally. In terms of accessibility, this is a good practice.