Access Over Deception: Fighting Deceptive Patterns through Accessibility

Abstract

Deceptive patterns, dark patterns, and manipulative user interfaces (UI) are a widely used design strategy that manipulates users to act against their own interests in pursuit of shareholder aims. These patterns may particularly affect people with less education, visual impairments, and older adults. Yet, access is a critical feature of the user experience (UX), development standards, and law. We considered whether and how the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and related legislation, like the European Accessibility Act (EAA), could act as a tool against deceptive patterns. We used heuristic evaluation to analyze whether and how deceptive patterns violate or conform to these guidelines and legal statutes. Although statistical analysis revealed no significant differences by pattern type, we identified three patterns implicated by the WCAG guidelines: Countdown Timer, Auto-Play, and Hidden Information. We offer this approach as one tool in the fight against UI-based deception and in support of inclusive design.

References in corpus (10)

• Dark Patterns at Scale: Findings from a Crawl of 11K Shopping Websites
• Dark Patterns after the GDPR: Scraping Consent Pop-ups and Demonstrating their Influence
• I am Definitely Manipulated, Even When I am Aware of it. It s Ridiculous! -- Dark Patterns from the End-User Perspective
• An Ontology of Dark Patterns Knowledge: Foundations, Definitions, and a Pathway for Shared Knowledge-Building
• Defending Against the Dark Arts: Recognising Dark Patterns in Social Media
• Theorizing Deception: A Scoping Review of Theory in Research on Dark Patterns and Deceptive Design
• Level Up or Game Over: Exploring How Dark Patterns Shape Mobile Games
• Accessibility Metatesting: Comparing Nine Testing Tools
• A Comparative Study of How People With and Without ADHD Recognise and Avoid Dark Patterns on Social Media
• Invisible, Unreadable, and Inaudible Cookie Notices: An Evaluation of Cookie Notices for Users with Visual Impairments