Accessibility Tax

The cumulative direct and indirect costs — financial, temporal, cognitive, and emotional — that disabled people pay to obtain the same access, outcomes, or opportunities available to non-disabled peers. Coined in non-academic contexts as 'crip tax' and distinguished by Olsen et al. (2024) from 'disability tax', the concept names the burden of inaccessible physical and digital infrastructure. Johnson et al. (2026) extend it to generative AI, identifying financial taxes (paid tiers, per-query token costs for tools like VOCR), disclosure taxes (revealing disability or identity to get relevant output), labour taxes (prompt engineering, verification, cross-referencing), and intersectional taxes that compound for multiply marginalised disabled users.