Employment Accommodations

Accommodations are enhancements to your workspace or business practices that allow employees with disabilities to contribute 100% of their talent to your organization.

Many accommodations are common sense and can be implemented very simply. Others need more consideration in order to prevent discrimination against persons with disabilities. The commitment to creating accommodations should be embedded in the Human Resource best practice policy or guidelines of your organization. Best practices which may require particular attention include:

Recruitment
Attracting talented persons with disabilities doesn’t have to be difficult. Publicize your commitment to employing persons with disabilities in the job information which you make available on your website and in job advertisements.

Job Design
Good job design ensures that job advertisements, job descriptions and candidate specifications do not discriminate, as well as making it easier for every new employee to perform effectively.

When writing job advertisements, job descriptions and candidate specifications ensure you do not needlessly exclude a candidate with a disability. Take time to ensure job criteria is grouped into what is ‘essential’ rather than what is ‘desirable’ in the role.

Flexible Working Arrangements
Be flexible with hours of work and work arrangements. Good work-life balance positively affects workplaces, employees and their families. It contributes to higher productivity and decreases staff turnover.

Sickness Absence
Disability is a natural part of the human experience, and it is not the same as being sick. Individuals with disabilities have varying degrees of need, and are sometimes sick, just as non-disabled persons are sometimes sick. Research indicates the people with disabilities take less time off work due to sickness than non-disabled employees.

Emergency Evacuation
Emergency evacuation plans must pay specific attention to employees and customers with disabilities. Train staff to guide and assist persons where necessary.

Assistive Technology
Assistive technology includes assistive, adaptive, and rehabilitative devices. Assistive technology promotes greater independence for persons with disabilities by enabling them to perform tasks that they were formerly unable to accomplish, or had great difficulty accomplishing.

As an example, the modern telephone is inaccessible to people who are deaf or hard of hearing. Combined with a text telephone, which converts typed characters into tones that may be sent over the telephone line, a deaf person is able to communicate immediately at a distance. Many telephones now have volume controls, which are primarily intended for the benefit of people who are hard of hearing. Some also have larger, well-spaced keys to facilitate accurate dialing for persons with fine motor coordination challenges..

Information
Some employees or customers may require information in alternative formats. This refers to formats such as Braille, large print, audio, CD or disk.

Employee Training and Development
Make sure that members of your team with disabilities can benefit from training. This means checking that all training providers (whether employed by your organization or an external organization) have received disability awareness training.

You will also need to ensure that the training will be accessible for persons with disabilities and that the trainers understand that best practice requires them to make accommodations such as:

ensuring videos are subtitled and audio described
booking sign language interpreters or captionists
sending written information in advance in the format needed by the person taking the course
ensuring that training venues meet accessibility requirements and regulations