Reasonable Accommodation Archives - Sheri Byrne-Haber's Blog

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The Manager’s Practical Guide to Handling an Employee Newly Diagnosed With a Disability

Most disabilities are acquired, not congenital. Helping employees adjust to having a disability is not just a kindness; it is legally required. This is part 1 of a three-part series. Part two will be on the interactive process. This article…

Know Your Accessibility Testers Before You Need To

Most accessibility managers have a vague sense of who their strongest team members are and, similarly, who the weakest are. Vagueness stops being good enough the moment a layoff list lands on your desk or a high-stakes audit is staffed…

You can’t audit your way into accessibility culture change

Accessibility audits play a clear and useful role in modern software development, yet teams often assign them far more influence to them than they can realistically deliver. Audits occur at the end of the software development lifecycle, after product decisions…

Think About What You Feed Into Generative AI BEFORE The Demand Letter Arrives

You have been using generative AI to do your job better. You asked it to turn a 300-line bug spreadsheet into a readable executive summary for your leadership team. You used it to draft test plans for a new procurement…

Two SDNY Decisions in One Week Show Courts Are Done Messing around with Questionable Accessibility Litigation

Courts in SDNY have been showing their impatience with repetitive, cookie-cutter accessibility lawsuits for years. Two decisions from the Southern District of New York were issued last week. Together, they send a message that the accessibility field has needed to…

Locked Out: Why OTP and 2FA Often Fail Users with Disabilities

Two-factor authentication (2FA) and one-time passwords (OTPs) have become cornerstones of digital security. For most users, they are a minor inconvenience: a quick glance at a phone, a tap of a button, and they are in. For millions of users…

Getting Developers to Care about Accessibility: Carrots and Sticks

Most developers aren’t intentionally hostile to accessibility. They just weren’t taught about its importance. Plus, change is hard. Building accessibility into an inaccessible organization requires more than a style guide or a WCAG checklist. Successful change requires understanding what actually…

Why you shouldn’t trust the people who built your inaccessible site to fix it

You commissioned a website. The agency delivered. The site contains blood, sweat, tears, and no small amount of your organization’s money. And then, you find out about Title II. Alternatively, you may receive a demand letter. The agency that built…

Eight Skunkworks Projects That Advance Accessibility Without Approval

The term “skunkworks” comes from Lockheed Martin and originally referred to a secretive team building experimental aircraft during World War II. These days, it’s tech shorthand for small, scrappy groups that work independently and solve problems faster by skipping formal…

Embedding Accessibility SMEs in Remote Teams

The longer I work in accessibility, the more convinced I become that organizational structure is what determines whether accessibility efforts succeed or stall. Intent is merely a small component of success. Companies love centralizing accessibility teams, until time zones, handoffs,…

The Many “Blindnesses” of Neurodivergence That Have Nothing To Do With Sight

When people hear the word “blindness,” they often think of vision loss. But for many neurodivergent people, the word describes something entirely different. Neurodivergent “blindness” is a functional gap characterized by difficulty processing certain types of information in real-time, even…

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