Why accommodate disabled workers?
Jackson Clarion Ledger
Accommodating workers with disabilities involves providing assistance or making changes in the job or workplace that will enable the employee to do the job. There are laws and regulations against discriminating against applicants and employees with disabilities.
Many people with disabilities make excellent employees, providing valuable contributions at work. Employing disabled individuals should not be viewed as an expense but as an investment. Given the opportunity disabled workers often outperform their able-bodied counterparts. In the past two decades, the federal government and many states have passed laws that give people with disabilities the opportunity to succeed. The main federal law is the ADA, the Americans with Disabilities Act. It outlines the illegality of discriminating against people with disabilities. The law requires employers to accommodate the disabilities of applicants and employees, whenever possible.
A simple list of job duties could have saved company in ADA bias suit
Hr Morning
Accommodations for disabled employees needn’t be complicated. Here’s an example of how one simple step could have saved a retail chain from a sizable penalty for violating the ADA.
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. will pay a former long-term employee $90,000 to settle a disability discrimination lawsuit filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the agency announced.
EEOC’s lawsuit charged Wal-Mart with violating federal discrimination law when the giant retailer fired an intellectually disabled employee at one of its Wal-Mart stores in Rockford, Ill.
According to EEOC’s lawsuit, William Clark, who has intellectual disabilities that were first detected during childhood, began working for Wal-Mart in 1994. As a workplace accommodation for his intellectual disabilities, Clark needed a written list of daily tasks.
EEOC alleged that Wal-Mart had provided Clark with a daily list as an accommodation for years, but at some point the company decided to stop providing the list.
Wal-Mart claimed it terminated Clark because he failed to perform certain job duties. The EEOC charged that Clark’s purported failure to perform certain job duties was due to Wal-Mart no longer providing Clark with his daily duties list.
EEOC filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Western Division in 2014, after failing to reach a a pre-litigation settlement.
“The ADA provides the same standard of protection to employees with intellectual disabilities and to workers with physical disabilities,” said Julianne Bowman, EEOC’s district director in Chicago. “Employers must provide disabled employees with reasonable accommodations if they are necessary to enable the employee to perform his or her essential job duties. Here, a simple written list would have provided Mr. Clark with the accommodation he needed, and he wouldn’t have been terminated.”
Wal-Mart will pay Clark the $90,000 as part of a consent decree settling the suit, signed by U.S. District Judge Philip G. Reinhard.
The two-year decree also provides additional, non-monetary relief intended to improve the Wal-Mart workplace. Under the decree, Wal-Mart will:
§ train employees on disability discrimination and requests for reasonable accommodations under the ADA, and
§ monitor requests for accommodation and complaints of disability discrimination and report those to the EEOC.
Cinema sued over closed captioning
WIAT 42
Celebration! Cinema is being sued by a man who is deaf who says a Benton Harbor theater discriminated against him by failing to provide closed captioning for the movies it shows, despite multiple requests.
The lawsuit filed this week says the Benton Harbor Celebration! Cinema, owned by Loeks Theater, Inc., violated Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability and says public accommodations cannot deny participation to individuals with disabilities.
Website Accessibility: Why There's Still Work to be Done on Government Portals
Government Technology
Despite major tech advances, many organizations still struggle with digital accessibility.
Banks The Latest Targets In Website Accessibility Claims
Mondaq News Alerts
Banks that wish to protect themselves from potentially complicated and costly litigation should consider taking the necessary steps to ensure they have an accessible website.
In the past year, Carlson Lynch Sweet Kilpela & Carpenter LLP, which was responsible for filing hundreds of Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) ATM class action lawsuits nationwide, has filed dozens of ADA website lawsuits in federal district court in Pittsburgh and sent out hundreds of demand letters to retailers and other types of businesses. The lawsuits filed in federal district court in Pittsburgh all contend that "[b]lind and visually impaired consumers must use screen reading software or other assistive technologies in order to access website content" and that the defendants' websites contain "digital barriers which limit the ability of blind and visually impaired consumers to access the site." Each lawsuit then describes the specific access barriers that the visually impaired plaintiffs allegedly encountered. The demand letters make essentially the same claims as the lawsuits, but offer the business an opportunity to avoid litigation by engaging in settlement discussions prior to suit. A draft proposed-settlement agreement is usually included with the demand letter, and typically, the demand letters also include a report prepared by a third-party "expert" vendor, which provides specific, technical examples of the alleged inaccessible areas of the business website.
Until very recently, we had not seen or heard of many—if any—banks being the targets of these demand letters or lawsuits. However, in the past week, we have been made aware of a number of demand letters directed to banks. This may be just the start of a new wave of demand letters directed at banks and financial institutions.
Currently, no specific ADA website standards exist, and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has now delayed issuing regulations on website accessibility until 2018. Despite the absence of standards, however, the DOJ has emphasized that businesses should make websites accessible to the disabled, and it has been aggressive in enforcing website accessibility. While no specific ADA guidelines exist yet, the DOJ has relied on a set of guidelines, known as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which were developed by a private industry group.
At this point, banks that wish to protect themselves from potentially complicated and costly litigation should consider taking the necessary steps to ensure they have an accessible website. It may be prudent to start this process before a demand letter is received or a lawsuit is filed.
Utah woman wages legal battle to make businesses accessible to people with disabilities
Salt Lake Tribune
Carolyn Ford, who uses a walker and a wheelchair to get around, was frustrated that a Utah County gas station and convenience store where she filled her tank and bought food had no van-accesible space.
The American Fork woman also has gotten stuck in the pool at her gym — which lacked steps to get in and out of the water despite a law requiring two accessible means of entry — and twice had to be lifted out by other patrons. And while going into stores with steep walkways isn't too bad, exiting them while pushing a shopping cart is "terrifying," Ford said.
"You feel like you're sliding down a hill and there's no way to stop," said Ford, 65, who suffers from pernicious anemia, which severely impairs her balance. "I've had to ask strangers if I could hold on to their arm or if they would hold on to my cart."
After multiple incidents, Ford had enough. Since April, she has brought about four dozen lawsuits in U.S. District Court accusing businesses in Lehi and American Fork of violating the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and asking that they be ordered to correct their violations.
No Way to Call Home: Incarcerated Deaf People Are Locked in a Prison inside a Prison
Truth-Out
This story is the result of a nine-month investigation and part one of a multimedia series on deaf prisoners, as part of a reporting collaboration with the Making Contact radio program.