Ada's Reasonable Accommodation: Myth Or Reality‪.‬

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was heralded as an opportunity for 37 million disabled Americans to be gainfully employed. The ADA requires employers to provide a reasonable accommodation without undue hardship that effectively accommodates an employee's physical or mental impairment (ADA, 1990, 42, U.S.C. 12112(5)(a)). These authors, in 1995, published experiences of employees with disabilities stemming from The Ohio Employment Discrimination Studies (OEDS). The Ohio Employment Discrimination Studies is a unique database containing 21 years of 10,197 employment discrimination claims filed between 1985 and 2006 under federal and Ohio law (Slonaker and Wendt, 2006). The 1995 article, "Patterns of Employment Discrimination Toward Workers with Disabilities," identified three patterns of employers' reasons for taking harmful action against employees with disabilities. Those patterns were: * Avoiding inconvenience--an employer's actions to avoid providing accommodation, e.g., ignoring an employee's disability, not recognizing a need for an accommodation, or failure to hire an applicant with an apparent disability.