Picture a public agency buying an artificial-intelligence assistant. The demonstration is smooth: speak, be understood, receive an answer.
Then comes the person who does not use speech as the system expects. Perhaps she communicates in American Sign Language. Perhaps she needs a visual or haptic alert because sound is not a reliable channel. Perhaps the service is a video interview, and a vendor’s scoring system treats a difference in speech or interaction as evidence of lesser ability. The EEOC warns that video-interview software analyzing speech patterns may not score applicants fairly when a speech impediment changes those patterns. The purchase has put a public service behind a door that opens only one way.
Federal buyers should stop treating that outcome as a bug to be fixed after launch. Every contract for AI that accepts, interprets or generates human communication should require the vendor, before deployment, to disclose access testing, supported modalities, failure modes, data practices and escalation paths. Accessibility should be contractual evidence and remedy, not product copy. The existing federal standard already frames the obligation in terms of access to functionality and requires agencies to identify how users with disabilities will perform supported functions.
This is not an exotic new demand. Section 508 already requires federal agencies, when developing, procuring, maintaining or using electronic and information technology, to provide employees and members of the public with access comparable to that available to people without disabilities. It directs the Access Board to publish the technical and functional criteria and directs procurement policy to incorporate them. The revised standards’ Section E205 reaches electronic content including web, software and multimedia; federal guidance says public-facing electronic content must be accessible.
The procurement practice is moving in the right direction but has not reached the point of enforcement. Federal guidance, updated in August, tells buyers to require a completed Accessibility Conformance Report for each standard technology item and a supplemental report explaining the evaluation methods, features, inaccessible core functions and configuration needed for access. It also describes an Issue Detail Supplement meant to convey the severity and user impact of identified issues. That is more useful than a glossy promise, but not enough for AI that listens, watches, scores and decides in real time.
A checkbox report can record whether a page has labels or a video has captions. It cannot, by itself, establish that a system gives comparable access when the interaction itself is the product. The federal government’s own FY2025 assessment supplies a warning against mistaking paperwork for performance: agencies reported an average accessibility-conformance score of 1.96 out of five, and the report cautioned that the score covered only the information and communication technology they tested and reported. If contracts accept a checkbox as the proof, they will reproduce that 1.96 score in a more powerful generation of technology.
The remedy is a short clause, not a sprawling pre-clearance regime. It should demand five things.
First, a vendor should identify every interaction modality that matters to the offered service: speech, text, signing video, image, keyboard, screen reader, sound and device feedback. If a task relies on spoken exchange, the vendor must provide a signed-language pathway that achieves the same task or a documented human alternative. That is the practical meaning of comparable access and alternative means under Section 508.
Second, the contract should require a visual and haptic twin for material audio prompts, alerts and status changes, with the buyer deciding which functions are material. That is an outcome requirement, not a command to buy a particular gadget. A missed emergency notice or inaccessible eligibility decision does not become acceptable because its interface is fashionable. Federal standards already identify emergency notifications and notices of benefits or program eligibility among official communications requiring accessible electronic content.
Third, vendors must disclose the access testing they actually performed: participants, tasks, environments, modalities, known failure modes and unresolved defects. The buyer should receive the test plan and the right to repeat representative hands-on testing before acceptance and after a material model or interface update. Existing federal guidance already recommends that buyers reserve pre-award testing rights and obtain a test plan built around typical user scenarios.
Fourth, the contract needs a real fail condition. If a core function cannot be completed comparably through the stated pathway, the vendor must provide a prompt human alternative, remedy the defect on a defined schedule and pause the affected automated decision or workflow where the failure could deny a service, job opportunity or benefit. A support inbox is not a remedy if the decision has already been made. When a statutory exception applies, Section 508 still requires an alternative means of access.
Fifth, a system that processes signing video must make specific data-governance representations: whether video is stored, for how long, where it goes, whether it trains or improves any model, who can access it, how it is secured, and how a user can obtain deletion consistent with the buyer’s legal obligations. Signing is not merely another file type. It is human communication, and the contract should treat it that way. A vendor’s documentation should match the functional and technical reality of the system, rather than merely asserting conformance.
The employment context makes the stakes plain. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission warns that software and AI used in hiring or employee assessment can disadvantage people with disabilities, and that an employer may remain responsible even when an outside vendor designed or administered the tool. Its guidance tells prospective buyers to ask whether the interface is accessible, whether materials come in alternative formats, which formats are unavailable and whether the tool disadvantages people with disabilities. It also calls for clear accommodation instructions and timely alternative formats or assessments.
That is a procurement memo hiding in civil-rights guidance. The buyer who waits until an applicant is screened out, a resident cannot navigate an automated service or an employee misses an alert has waited too long. The EEOC identifies prompt forwarding of accommodation requests or an agreement requiring the third party to provide accommodations on the employer’s behalf as promising practices. By then, the vendor’s limitations have become the buyer’s liability and someone else’s lost opportunity.
Before any agency publishes language like this, it should put the clause before three real buyers: a contracting officer, a program owner and the person responsible for accessibility. Ask what evidence they could evaluate before award, monitor afterward and enforce on a Monday morning. One lunch with those people will reveal more than one panel about responsible AI.
The point is not to punish imperfect technology. It is to make vendors compete on evidence, candor and repair. A company that shows what its system supports, where it breaks and how it makes people whole deserves a procurement advantage. “Works for everyone” is not a contractual claim.
An AI system that can hear only one way is not inclusive. It is a gatekeeper with a modern logo. Public buyers have the authority — and the obligation — to insist that the gate opens.
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