Real Safety AI Foundation / Research

Disability, Accessibility, and Civil Rights

Accommodation Repricing: Disability, Generative AI Subscriptions, and the Accessibility Tax as a Variable the Vendor Controls

Publisher: Real Safety AI Foundation

Working paper. Not peer reviewed.

Written
August 2026
Version
v0.7
Pages
20
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Abstract

Disabled people increasingly meet access needs with general purpose generative artificial intelligence sold as a commercial subscription rather than with prescribed assistive technology. Three findings are established in the accessible computing literature: the use is widespread across disability communities, it is frequently necessary rather than discretionary, and pricing tiers determine the quality of access a disabled user can obtain. This paper extends the third finding from level to change. Prior work describes what a disabled user can afford at a moment in time. This paper describes what happens when the price, the metered quantity, or the capability itself moves after the user has already reorganized around it, and it names that event accommodation repricing. The argument is that two literatures each hold half of the mechanism and neither holds the join. The accessibility tax literature describes the standing cost of inaccessibility and treats that cost as a level. The assistive technology abandonment literature explains why access tools fall out of use but locates the cause in the device, in the match between device and user, or in the user’s own changing needs; a complete reading of the two most cited taxonomies in that literature finds no category at all for a cost the supplier moves after adoption. The paper identifies three positions a disabled user can occupy with respect to an access capability, and argues the third is the most exposed: prescribed assistive technology, where obligations attach; a consumer subscription, where the user is a weak party to a contract they cannot negotiate; and a platform procured by an institution, where the capability can be metered or withdrawn in a transaction the disabled user is not a party to at all. The paper distinguishes accommodation repricing from technoableism, which explains how the accommodation came to be a commercial product but does no work on what happens afterward, and it takes up the strongest existing objection, that recent power aware work in accessible computing has already displaced the adoption-as-fit account. It declines to coin a new category of ableism on the ground that the mechanism is already named at both ends by existing literatures. It then builds and runs the instrument capable of measuring the phenomenon without asking disabled people to narrate a cost increase they cannot escape: a longitudinal documentary audit of published vendor pricing artifacts, coded from dated public archive captures. A first pass across 16 vendor surfaces, with one consumer surface coded in full across 12 consecutive quarters, finds the predicted behavior in a form stronger than a price increase. The posted price of the paid tier did not change across three years. The quantity behind it was metered, then re-expressed in a unit not commensurable with the one it replaced, leaving the user without the comparison required to detect that anything had been reduced.

Keywords

  • accommodation repricing
  • accessibility tax
  • disability tax
  • generative artificial intelligence
  • assistive technology abandonment
  • subscription pricing
  • switching costs
  • technoableism
  • crip technoscience
  • educational technology procurement
  • accessible computing
  • documentary audit

Plain language slides

First slide of the plain language summary of Accommodation Repricing: Disability, Generative AI Subscriptions, and the Accessibility Tax as a Variable the Vendor ControlsOpen the 30-slide summary (PDF)

Suggested citation

Gilly, Travis. "Accommodation Repricing: Disability, Generative AI Subscriptions, and the Accessibility Tax as a Variable the Vendor Controls." Real Safety AI Foundation Working Paper, August 2026. https://realsafetyai.org/research/4fz3q7/

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