Reasonable Accommodations
What they do, and why they matter.
These are links to help people with disabilities cut down on the emotional labour of self advocacy. This page can help you understand what reasonable accommodations looks like and how to be an ally to the neurodivergent community.
Accommodations are an important part of making spaces and institutions accessible to all.
The more we understand the easier it is to be authentically supportive. The more authentic our actions are, the less energy we expend on emotional labour to accomplish the same task.
Equity or Equality?
Affirmative Action
- A concept created for policies that address diversification goals by proactively counteracting the effects of disproportionate marginalization rooted in the concept of equity, which is different from equality.
- For example, among equivalently approximately qualified applicants for university admission, affirmative action policies may admit a minority over a non-minority applicant.
Affirmative action moves you ahead, but equality does not.
Accommodation
- By contrast, accommodation in the context of disability is not proactive by nature and is rooted in the concept of equality and basic respect for a person’s health and boundaries.
- Accommodations enable a person with disabilities to have a reasonable quality of life in a society that generally operates without consideration of their basic environmental needs.
- For example, a person who cannot walk may need an elevator, lecture recording, or room change to access the classroom due to their impairment
- … even at the cost of reduced social interaction in the case of a recording accommodation.
The end result of providing the accommodation does not move the student ahead in any corrective capacity relative to their disproportionately advantaged peers, as would be the case in affirmative action policies around disability.
Regardless of how feasible someone’s needs are to accommodate in a given situation, these policies are inherently far less progressive in that they are only geared towards meeting basic access, safety, and health concerns.
What Makes A Reasonable Accommodation?
- Are you legally required to provide this accommodation?
- Did you keep the presence of students and employees with disabilities in mind when designing your classroom or workplace administrative policies?
- Is the accommodation effective for that specific individual?
- Due to the wide variance in explanatory factors and symptom and trait expression, it becomes important to avoid relying on one’s prior experience and instead listen to the student or colleague directly (Kirby and Smith 2021).
- Are you able to provide these accommodations, considering the class/organization size? (Kirby and Smith 2021)
- Assumes you have seriously considered a disability when applying for grants.
- Presumes you considered integrating flexible universal design principles into your class/workplace design.
- Are you able to dedicate the necessary resources? (Kirby and Smith 2021)
- Assumes you have looked into the availability of
- … private and public funding.
- … department partnerships for disability.
- … equity-related resources/tax credits in your department.
- … or in the case of education settings, education-based accessibility funding.
However, “the overall aim should always be, as far as possible, to remove or reduce any disadvantage faced by a [person with disabilities]” (Kirby and Smith 2021).