13 Accommodation

“Many accommodations demanded under COVID-19 were implemented within weeks, including the ability to work from home, to have flexible schedules, to get what we need without excessive and demeaning documentation, to share and celebrate creative adaptation, to work with the knowledge that all schedules can change. These are all things that disabled and chronically ill people have wanted for a very long time. I hope that when we’ve flattened the curve and saved as many people as possible, we don’t return to a world in which disabled people are ignored (especially when COVID-19 will probably produce more of us).”

– Ashley Shew, Assistant Professor in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg ^[1]

Accommodation is a concept that goes hand-in-hand with accessibility.  Accommodation refers to any modification or adjustment made to the environment, equipment, or processes that enables a person with a disability to participate in activities, including work or education, on an equitable basis with others. It is important to note that accommodations should be tailored to meet the specific needs of the individual and may vary based on the type of disability and the context in which they are needed.^[2]  According to the Federal Disability Reference Guide, “to overcome physical, technological, or informational barriers, various types of accommodation may be required, including:

• • physical accommodation;
  • communication accommodation;
  • assistive accommodation through technological and human support; and
  • procedural accommodation through flexible work /educational schedules and alternate formats.”^[3]

In the workplace, accommodations may include modifying work schedules, providing assistive technology, modifying physical workspaces, and making alternative arrangements for essential job functions.

In education, accommodations may include providing extended time for tests, alternative testing formats, note-taking services, or accessible classroom equipment.^[4] The goal of accommodations in education is to provide students with disabilities equitable access to educational opportunities and to ensure that their disabilities do not impede their learning.

Despite many workplaces, universities, colleges and other institutions having formal accommodation policies, the understanding of why such policies exist, and how they can be most frictionlessly implemented is far from universal. While accommodation processes are supposed to be conversations, they often “devolve into bureaucratic processes” for students to navigate.^[5]  Accommodation is not typically universal; Institutional accommodation policies and practices typically place the duty to alert institutions on the person living with the disability.  Even if the system has a duty to accommodate and is responsive, the obligation to make the request (and the due diligence accompanying it) does create a unique burden.

People living with invisible disabilities are often in a unique form of stigma squeeze, disbelieved by many who are asked to accommodate the difficulties presented by their condition, but also sometimes marginalized by members of the broader disability community.  Conditions like fibromyalgia, for example, have long been met with skepticism in certain quarters,^[6] but the distinction between a somatic condition (a mental illness manifest as physical pain or impairment) and invisible confirmed physical impairment is fundamentally trivial.