Ask About: Arranging Reasonable Employment Accommodations

Does the Americans with Disabilities Act provide reasonable accommodation forms? How long should it take to get your reasonable accommodation? This edition of Ask About the ADA helps explain how employees with disabilities can arrange reasonable accommodations in the workplace. For a transcript of today's episode, please visit the Ask About the ADA podcast feed on BuzzSprout.
Read more about reasonable accommodation procedures:
Ask About the ADA - Reasonable Accommodation Forms
Read more about how long a reasonable accommodation might take:
Ask About the ADA - How Long for a Reasonable Accommodation

NortheastADA.org

Transcript

SPEAKER: Hello and welcome to this edition of ask-about-the-ADA, the podcast where we tackle frequently asked questions about the Americans with Disabilities Act. And we talk about how it might apply to your everyday life. 


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On this week's edition, we have two different employment related questions. So without more to do let's get right into it. The first question is this, does the ADA provide reasonable accommodation forms? Well, the answer is no, it does not. Typically when you submit a reasonable accommodation request on the job there may be some paperwork and sometimes employers might refer to it as quote unquote ADA paperwork. However, that paperwork comes from an individual employer or an individual organization. 

The Americans with Disabilities Act of course is a civil rights law that provides protections for people with disabilities. However, it does not mandate any specific or special forms for reasonable accommodation requests and therefore any paperwork actually must come from your employer not from a federal agency. 

Typically when you submit paperwork the process is going to be managed by the human resource department of your company. Assuming it's large enough to have one if it's not your employer may have a different process, but the accommodation paperwork should begin the reasonable accommodation conversation and dialogue. Now, that being said, let's go look at the second employment related question. 

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Our next question is this, how long should a reasonable accommodation take for my job? Well, there is no official time frame on how long a reasonable accommodation request should take on a job. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission enforces title one of the ADA, the part of the law that deals with employment. 

Here's what they have to say, an accommodation request should be as expeditiously as possible. They don't specify a specific length of time. An employer has to make a good faith effort to engage in the process to receive the accommodation, begin the reasonable accommodation interactive process if it's necessary, and then to provide the actual accommodation itself whatever is determined to be the appropriate accommodation. 

This whole process should be prompt but there is nothing to say an accommodation should take two weeks or it should take a month. It depends on a case by case basis on what the person is asking for and what information needs to be gathered and determining what is best and most appropriate and then getting that accommodation in place. So it really can vary from situation to situation, depending on what is asked and what changes are needed in order to provide the person with a reasonable accommodation. 

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That is it for today's edition of ask-about-the-ADA. If you would like to submit a question to be answered on the podcast, please feel free to reach out to us here at the Northeast ADA center you can call us at 1 (800) 949-4232 or you can submit a question through our website www.northeastada.org or of course you can shoot us an email at northeastada@cornell.edu and we would be glad to answer it or if you simply have an ADA related question please feel free to reach out. 

Also please feel free to follow us on social media, on Facebook, on Instagram, and on Twitter. We hope that you'll subscribe to this podcast and choose to make it part of your regular downloads and that's all for this week. We look forward to talking with you again soon. 

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