A presentation at KCDC 2024 in in Kansas City, MO, USA by Todd Libby
Deceptive Patterns and FAST Framework for Accessible Specfication of Technologies @toddlibby KCDC 2024
Thank you KCDC!
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Todd Libby Senior Accessibility Engineer W3C Invited Expert Accessibility Advocate Portland, Maine 🦞 Phoenix, Arizona 🌵 Fmr. Exec. Head Chef @toddlibby KCDC 2024
What is FAST?
The Framework for Accessible Specfication of Technologies (FAST) advises creators of technical specifications how to ensure their technology meets the needs of people with disabilities.
Goals of FAST
Numerous guidelines exist for creating and supporting content that is accessible to people with disabilities, on and off the Web. When these guidelines are supported in the entire web ecosystem, content creators can author accessible content, and expect the accessibility features to be made available by user agents, including assistive technologies when needed. Authoring tools support creation of accessible content, and accessibility features survive transmission to different systems or conversion of content to different formats.
Nearly all of these accessibility features depend on support in some form from the technology in which content is encoded, transmitted, and sometimes transformed. But there is not yet a set of well-documented guidance for such technologies. Instead, requirements are inferred from authoring and user agent guidelines. This makes it complicated for technology creators to ensure they have met the full set of needs. Review from accessibility specialists is limited by bandwidth and expertise, so does not fully address that problem. As a result, varying technologies provide various levels of support with varying levels of compatibility with other technologies. These issues at the core layers of Web technology impact the progress that can be made from support of higher-level guidelines.
Framework for Accessible Specification of Technologies aims to fill this gap. It is intended to be a single, well-considered set of guidelines addressing specifically the features technologies need to provide to support accessible. These guidelines relate to the requirements of other guidelines but should not be confused with them. The goal of FAST is to provide a single source of guidelines for Web technology accessibility. They relate to other guidelines and documentation to provide additional information and rationale for the requirement, but are intended to be a self-sufficient set of guidelines that technology creators can follow.
User & Functional Needs
User need: A high-level accessibility characteristic of content and/or a user interface that is necessary for users to complete an objective.
Functional need: A statement that describes a specific gap in one’s ability, or a specific mismatch between ability and the designed environment or context.
Along with POUR (Perceivable, Operable, Understandabale, Robust) we have added Personalization and Deceptive Patterns with over 1,500 intersections of user and functional needs.
3 Stages of FAST
FAST Approach Three stages • Inventory functional and user needs; • Identify ways to meet needs; • Develop technology guidelines to meet those needs as best as we can.
“Dark” Patterns
Harry Brignull Cognitive Scientist, designer, UX consultant • 2010 coined “dark patterns” • Gained traction in legal circles • Still used widely today
No to “Dark” Patterns
Connotation and Inclusion
A 1945 voting ballot from Nazi Germany featuring a deceptive pattern to get voters to vote, yes. Also to find out who voted no as well.
Black/Dark - Evil, disgrace, vile, immoral • Slave/Master • White Hat/Black Hat • Blacklist/Whitelist • Grandfathered
White/Light - Purity, good, innocence, cleanliness • Primary/Secondary • Ethical/Non-Ethical Hacker • Deny/Allow-list • Exempt
A conversation about naming that Harry Brignull and I had.
Deceptive Patterns or Anti-patterns
“A deceptive pattern is a deliberate anti-pattern designed to confuse or deceive a user. There is a difference between poor design and unintentional blockers for users.” Functional Needs Subgroup
“A deceptive pattern is where there is a deliberate attempt to aim or force a user down a particular path or to trap attention in a way that redirects or focuses on a goal, that the user either doesn’t want or need or maybe harmful to them.” Functional Needs Subgroup
Deceptive Pattern: Deliberate. With intent Anti-pattern: No intent but harmful/bad UX
Solving User Needs
Makes Web pages more accessible and usable, less harmful to people with disabilities and neurodivergent users, and creates friendlier and safer user experiences for everyone.
Barriers & Categories
Deceptive Patterns Categories of barriers • Wording • Consistency (Affordances) • Adjustability / Flow blockers • (Time) Pressure • Invasive
Deceptive Patterns Examples of patterns/anti-patterns • Trick questions; • Infinite scroll; • Copy and paste is disabled; • Timers; • Asking the user to enable features (microphone, camera, etc.).
Unsubscribe Shaming Anti-Pattern
Unsubscribe Shaming Anti-Pattern
⚠ Content Warning 🚨
CAPTCHA Anti-Pattern
Confusing Navigation Anti-Pattern
Unsubscribe Shaming Anti-Pattern
Subscription Deception (Roach Motel) Deceptive Pattern
Obscuring Deceptive Pattern
Pay to Play Deceptive Pattern
Stalling Deceptive Pattern
Stalling Deceptive Pattern
Stalling Deceptive Pattern
Free Bait Deceptive Pattern
A deceptive pattern used by Donald Trump to raise money for his 2020 campaign.
Netflix Price Comparison Deceptive Pattern
Netflix Price Comparison Deceptive Pattern with the extra option shown
User Experience Deceptive Pattern, no way to delete account in Netflix
Comparison Prevention T-Mobile
Comparison Prevention T-Mobile screen comparison
Comparison Prevention hiding lowest tier
Roach Motel
Any current gap in the WCAG guidelines we want to address through FAST and Deceptive Patterns.
The most important part about bringing Deceptive Patterns to WAI / WCAG 3 is to reduce harm to those who are affected.
People can use without physical harm or risk (to themselves or others within a physical environment).
Ways to Meet User Needs
How to meet user needs: • Author design & technical implementation • User agent accessibility support of standard & author-implemented features • Assistive technology support (including accessibility API mediation)
User needs need to be analyzed for how they can be met.
But…
What about large companies like Meta, Twitter, Google, etc.? How will you get them to change?
Ethical Web Principles
• W3C TAG Ethical Web Principles • The web should be a platform that helps people and provides a positive social benefit • Ethical Principles for Web Machine Learning • This document discusses ethical issues associates with using Machine Learning and outlines considerations for web technologies that enable related use cases
Links to resources
Twitter: @toddlibby LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/toddlibby
@TODDLIBBY • KCDC 2024 Feedback QR Code
Questions?
Thank you!
Deceptive patterns (also widely known as “dark patterns”) are all over the Web. I’ll speak to the accessibility impact deceptive patterns and “dark” patterns have accessibility-wise, inclusively, moving away from using “dark” patterns as vernacular, and my introduction to taking these patterns and my work in the W3C to have these published in WCAG3.
There is a lot of work being done in the Functional Needs group of the W3C to introduce these to FAST. I’ll talk about FAST, what it means to accessibility, and to users, developers, designers, and everyone in-between in the organization.
I’ll also introduce people to the Framework for Accessible Specification of Technologies (FAST) which advises creators of technical specifications on ensuring their technology meets the needs of users with disabilities.
It primarily addresses web content technologies but also relates to any technology that affects web content sent to users, including client-side APIs, transmission protocols, and interchange formats.
Specifications that implement these guidelines make it possible for content authors and user agents to render the content in an accessible manner to people with a wide range of abilities.
The following resources were mentioned during the presentation or are useful additional information.
Framework for Accessible Specification of Technologies (FAST) advises creators of technical specifications how to ensure their technology meets the needs of user with disabilities.
The colors black and white have long carried opposite connotations. Douglas Longshore goes into the history and the vernacular behind color and racial attitudes.
For decades, affective scientists have examined how adults and children reason about others’ emotions. Yet, our knowledge is limited regarding how emotion reasoning is impacted by race-that is, how individuals reason about emotions displayed by people of other racial groups.
The web should be a platform that helps people and provides a positive social benefit. As we continue to evolve the web platform, we must therefore consider the consequences of our work. The following document sets out ethical principles that will drive the W3C’s continuing work in this direction.
This document discusses ethical issues associated with using Machine Learning and outlines considerations for web technologies that enable related use cases.
This is a draft checklist to support the Framework for Accessibility in the Specification of Technologies (FAST) prepared by the Accessible Platform Architectures Working Group. The goal of FAST is to describe the features that web technologies should provide to ensure it is possible to create content that is accessible to users with disabilities. The full framework references an analysis of user requirements and describes how technologies, content authoring, and user agents work together to meet these needs and provide comprehensive guidance to technology developers. This checklist extracts that information at a high level to aid in the self-review of technologies. Specification developers can use this to help ensure the technology will address features likely to be raised during the horizontal review from accessibility proponents.
Web technologies address a variety of needs, and play a variety of roles in web accessibility. Content languages describe primary content, styling languages impact presentation, APIs enable manipulation and data interchange, and protocols tie it all together. Each of these types of technologies can impact accessibility.
This checklist is organized by the types of features that technology may provide. If the technology provides such a feature, the checklist items under the heading are applicable and should be examined. If the technology does not provide such a feature, the checklist items under the heading are not applicable and can be passed over.
W3C Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 3.0 will provide a wide range of recommendations for making web content more accessible to users with disabilities. Following these guidelines will address many of the needs of users with blindness, low vision and other vision impairments; deafness and hearing loss; limited movement and dexterity; speech disabilities; sensory disorders; cognitive and learning disabilities; and combinations of these. These guidelines address accessibility of web content on desktops, laptops, tablets, mobile devices, wearable devices, and other web of things devices. The guidelines apply to various types of web content including static, dynamic, interactive, and streaming content; visual and auditory media; virtual and augmented reality; and alternative access presentation and control. These guidelines also address related web tools such as user agents (browsers and assistive technologies), content management systems, authoring tools, and testing tools.
Deceptive patterns (also known as “dark patterns”) are tricks used in websites and apps that make you do things that you didn’t mean to, like buying or signing up for something. This is a site that shows examples of deceptive patterns and a resource on what they do and how they work.
An important resource on why “accessibility” overlays do not work and the problems they cause disabled users.
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