[Caveat: I'm super uninterested in hearing about big pharma conspiracies or whatever, please don't send me this.]
Well, except for the severely disabled who can't advocate for themselves because they can't speak or communicate online, and now find themselves crowded out for the very benefits that were created to support them in the first place. But they're not the ones that vote or sound off on social media, so they're easier to ignore.
edited to add: wait, so if there are accomodations for autism, were there not accomodations for aspergers or other developmental disorder? why not expand the accomodation and not the diagnosis?? The same professionals that determine autism from other disorders should be able to prescribe similar accomodations??
Accommodation is not good for everybody. I've had to get into serious conversations with people with serious disabilities about divvying up responsibilities because we worked the same shift, if they accommodated me they were fucked, if I accommodated them I was fucked, if we complained and tried to get accommodation elsewhere we would both be fucked and we both knew it. Accommodation is often hard as shit and sucks ass, it's grinding work, it's not something that falls from the sky, it's something actual people spend their days working on. Further people aren't unaware that they're accommodating you, that you rely on them, and thus they have power over you, people aren't stupid and they will take advantage when they need to and think they can get away with it, and feel morally justified in doing so.
It's only a SUBSET of accommodation which is good for everybody, and those are the truly special accommodations, those are the cases where we remove systemic barriers. Work from home is the best contemporary example of this which has simply made the employment opportunities for the disabled fucking explode while increasing their quality of life and importantly the disabled aren't usually being perceived as getting any sort of special treatment or favouritism because everybody gets the same benefit (unless you have a work in office mandate). The idealistic and impossible goal of disability rights is not accommodation, it's the total breaking down of systemic barriers to create a utopia where everybody lives equally and independently with no need for accommodation, but we have accommodation because that shit is an impossible ideal.
To summarise though, accommodation is a lesser evil to the alternative which tends to be better for all parties involved, breaking down systemic barriers is the ideal which can actually create true equality. I tend to see curb cuts as falling into the latter category more than the former.
https://disneyparks.disney.go.com/blog/2013/10/guest-assista...
http://babesindisneylandblog.com/my-thoughts-on-the-disabled...
My take on why accommodations were not expanded to different diagnoses is that there is, rightly or wrongly, a perception of lesser severity with a diagnosis of PDD-NOS or Asperger's that would stratify the level of services available. And since people always want more, you'd have ended up with more push into the "autism" category anyway.
It’s not as simple as ‘no intellectual disability’ because there are non-verbal autistic people who have no intellectual disability.