Aaditya Prasad A and Anaan Noor are 4th Year B.A. LL.B. (Hons.) students at The National University of Advanced Legal Studies (NUALS), Kochi.
ABSTRACT
Dark patterns are user interface [“UI”] tactics that exploit cognitive biases to guide user decisions, causing unique and often overlooked harms to disabled consumers. This blog tries to examine how deceptive design, from mislabelled buttons to broken screen-reader focus order, results in “accessibility-related deception” and chronic “vigilance fatigue” for blind, low-vision, and neurodivergent users, increasing the cognitive and financial burden of navigating digital interfaces. The blog also examines regulatory responses in the United States, European Union, and India and argues that accessibility law and consumer protection law each address only half the problem and ends with recommendations to bridge this gap.
INTRODUCTION
Think of a scenario in which a user who is blind is trying to cancel a subscription. She opens the account settings page using her screen reader and navigates the interface, listening for the word “cancel”. However, it never announced even though the button exists visually, styled in pale grey text on a white background, but has no programmatic label. To a sighted user, it’s just hard to notice, but to her, it doesn’t exist at all.
This is not a usability issue but part of a broader pattern of accessibility barriers that affects how users interact with digital services. A 2025 study on blind and low-vision mobile users found that missing or misleading labels routinely cause “navigation disorientation” confusion while locating or navigating interface elements and erode trust in an interface, a phenomenon researchers term as “accessibility-related deception”. Researchers have also identified techniques such as “ “focus hijacking” and “label deprivation”.Focus hijacking diverts a screen reader’s pointer away from the item a user intends to access, while label deprivation removes text required for assistive technology to announce interactive elements. These techniques deny independent access to disabled users.
These issues are not mere coding errors but rather “dark patterns”, a term coined by UX researcher Dr. Harry Brignull in 2010, to describe interfaces built to deliberately trick people. These design choices exploit cognitive biases in how people perceive and process information, steering them towards unintended outcomes. When such manipulative designs target users who rely on an accessible interface to access digital services, the issue moves from a simple user experience complaint to a civil rights concern by excluding disabled users altogether.
HOW DARK PATTERNS AFFECT DISABLED USERS
The Federal Trade Commission’s [“FTC”] 2022 staff report and its later joint review with international consumer protection networks classified these deceptive tactics into groups including sneaking, which hides information necessary for decision-making and obscuring techniques, which involve presenting information in a way that steers the consumer towards choices beneficial to the business.
Often for users without disabilities, these patterns might cause annoyance, but in the case of disabled users, additional access costs can add up quickly, making participation feel more like a burden than an opportunity. This burden is not uniform across all disabilities. In 2025, a study using NASA TLX found that people with ADHD experience dark patterns differently from allistic participants. The inconsistency can be seen across factors such as effort, frustration and mental demand, which suggests that the same manipulative screen can produce +different levels of psychological stress depending on how a person’s brain interprets it.
Visually impaired consumers had reported issues such as hidden fees that appears at checkouts, preselected add-ons that require unchecking to avoid charges, and cancellation processes that seem designed to confuse. These harms are frequently accompanied by vigilance fatigue, which is the need to constantly double-check totals, checkboxes and links, a process that sighted users can perform relatively easily at a glance. When interactive controls such as a checkbox isn’t visible or a decline option is hidden on the site, the resulting frustration isn’t merely inconvenient but it produces distress that researchers now treat as a distinct disability-specific harm category, separate from the financial loss itself .
WHERE THE LAW FALLS SHORT
The legal frameworks for disability and consumer protection regulate accessibility and deceptive commercial practices respectively while dark patterns occupy the space between these areas. The main limitation of accessibility laws is that they ask whether a barrier exists, not whether it was intentional. This can be noticed when looking at a global perspective, a review of legislations in the United States, European Union and India reveals the same gap.
United States of America
The Department of Justice’s 2024 Title II regulation issued under the Americans with Disabilities Act requires state and local governments to comply with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 level AA, an international technical standard that encompasses captioning and alternative text, with compliance deadlines extending to 2027 and 2028. In the consumer sector, the case involving Amazon in 2025 highlighted concerns over deceptive interface design, with the company agreeing to a $ 2.5 billion settlement was issued over a complex subscription cancellation process. . This decision also matters for disabled users, since confusing designs like this are even harder for people with cognitive or motor impairments to navigate even though the ruling doesn’t mention disability directly. Additionally,California’s Consumer Privacy Rights Act [“CPRA”] defines dark patterns and deems consent obtained through such manipulations legally invalid. Moreover, the US federal appeals court in 2025 set aside the FTC’s Click to Cancel rule, which required cancelling as easily as signing up, resulting in enforcement efforts that rely on a broader, case-by-case standard of unfairness.
It is important to note that disability aspects are not present in both scenarios; accessibility rules do not ask whether a technically compliant interface was built to manipulate, and consumer protection actions do not ask who was least able to notice manipulation in the first place.
EUROPEAN UNION
The European Union [“EU”] has one of the most active enforcement mechanisms through its European Accessibility Act [“EAA”], which became enforceable in 2025 and mandates compliance with EN 301549, which incorporates WCAG 2.1 Level AA, across the e-commerce, banking, and telecom sectors. Fines range from 60,000 euros to 900,000 euros, and some member states also allow criminal penalties.
On dark patterns, the European Data Protection Board [“EDPB”] published guidelines in 2023 classifying deceptive UI into six groups under the General Data Protection Regulation [“GDPR”] fairness principle, and Ireland’s Data Protection Commission used these guidelines to justify a 345 million euro fine against TikTok. Even though the EDPB’s own guidance flags dark patterns as harmful to persons with disabilities, neither the EDPB guidelines nor the EAA enforcement framework treats this as a disability rights problem with its own remedy.
INDIA’S VERSION OF THE LEGISLATIVE GAP
Sections 40 to 46 of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016 [“RPwD Act”] require the government to set Information and Communication Technology [“ICT”] accessibility standards that are binding on public and private providers. Its “barrier” definition is broad[SCE[AS]17] compared to other jurisdictions, covering communicational, attitudinal and structural factors not just physical ones, capable of encompassing a deceptively hidden cancel button. The implementing standards IS 17802 and GIGW 3.0 reduce that mandate to a familiar checklist, which includes WCAG 2.1 Level AA, captioning, and alt text, now extended via an October 2024 RBI directive on accessible digital banking, a step in the positive direction.
India has emerged as one of the few jurisdictions with a dedicated regulatory framework for dark patterns. In November 2023, the Central Consumer Protection Authority [“CCPA”] notified the guidelines for prevention and regulation of dark patterns, 2023 under Section 18 of the Consumer Protection Act 2019 which identified 13 prohibited dark patterns, including false urgency, basket sneaking, and subscription traps. These guidelines helped in flagging platforms like MakeMyTrip for false urgency and complaints involving quick-commerce and ride-hailing platforms. In June 2025, the CCPA required e-commerce platforms to complete self-audits within three months to identify and eliminate dark patterns.
Despite these measures, significant enforcement gaps remain. The 13 patterns recognised do not address disability or assistive technologies, and the RPwD framework omits deceptive design and limited coordination between CCPA and the Department of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities, which would ultimately allow deceptive interfaces to pass the Guidelines for Indian Government Websites audit on code alone while staying invisible to screen reader user .
In India, policymakers need not create a new regulatory framework to address deceptive design affecting disabled users. Instead, they should integrate the existing two systems.
First, the CCPA should amend its guidelines for the prevention and regulation of Dark Patterns to expressly recognise accessibility related deception, including mislabelled controls, misleading interface elements, and broken focus order as regulated dark patterns.
Second, the department of empowerment of persons with disabilities must require accessibility audits under IS 17802 to include testing with real assistive technologiesrather than relying solely on automated WCAG compliance scans.
Third, automated tools often miss forms of deception that affect disabled users. Hence, companies should test with actual assistive technologies and disabled users.
Beyond regulatory reforms, companies must themselves change their approach.
Corporations should begin treating “vigilance fatigue” as a design metric, recognising that if users must repeatedly verify information or actions to avoid deception, the interface has failed regardless of its technical accessibility standards. Frameworks such as SCAR, which measure things such as whether a screen reader’s focus moves in a predictable way through a page, as a complement to standard accessibility testing. Most importantly, disabled users should be involved throughout the design process, replacing deficit-focused approaches with inclusive and participatory design that reflects how they actually navigate and make decisions in digital spaces.
CONCLUSION
Dark patterns that affect disabled users bring out the regulatory gap that neither accessibility law nor consumer protection law addresses adequately. Across the United States, the European Union and India, the accessibility framework focuses on technical compliance while dark patterns regulation concentrates on deceptive commercial practices, leaving accessibility related deception largely unaddressed. Although India has one of the most comprehensive regulatory regimes on dark patterns, it too lacks recognition of disability-specific manipulation.
Bridging this gap does not require new legislation; instead, existing frameworks should work together and implement stronger enforcement mechanisms, and digital products should be designed with disabled users in mind, recognising that accessibility is both a consumer protection issue and a disability rights issue.