Access Over Deception: Fighting Deceptive Patterns through Accessibility
Tobias Pellkvist, Katie Seaborn, Miu Kojima

TL;DR
This paper explores how accessibility standards like WCAG and legislation such as the EAA can be used to combat deceptive UI patterns, analyzing their violations and potential as regulatory tools.
Contribution
It introduces a heuristic evaluation method to assess how deceptive patterns relate to accessibility guidelines and legislation, highlighting specific patterns implicated by these standards.
Findings
No significant difference in violations across pattern types
Countdown Timer, Auto-Play, and Hidden Information are linked to WCAG guidelines
Accessibility standards can serve as tools against deceptive UI patterns
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,…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
