Title I Technical Assistance Manual

3.5 Some Examples of Reasonable Accommodation

The statute and EEOC's regulations provide examples of common types of reasonable accommodation that an employer may be required to provide, but many other accommodations may be appropriate for particular situations. Accommodations may include:

• making facilities readily accessible to and usable by an individual with a disability;

• restructuring a job by reallocating or redistributing marginal job functions;

• altering when or how an essential job function is performed;

• part-time or modified work schedules;

• obtaining or modifying equipment or devices;

• modifying examinations, training materials or policies;

• providing qualified readers and interpreters;

• reassignment to a vacant position;

• permitting use of accrued paid leave or unpaid leave for necessary treatment;

• providing reserved parking for a person with a mobility impairment; and

• allowing an employee to provide equipment or devices that an employer is not required to provide.

These and other types of reasonable accommodation are discussed in the pages that follow. However, the examples in this Manual cannot cover the range of potential accommodations, because every reasonable accommodation must be determined on an individual basis. A reasonable accommodation always must take into consideration two unique factors:

• the specific abilities and functional limitations of a particular applicant or employee with a disability; and

• the specific functional requirements of a particular job.

In considering an accommodation, the focus should be on the abilities and limitations of the individual, not on the name of a disability or a particular physical or mental condition. This is necessary because people who have any particular disability may have very different abilities and limitations. Conversely, people with different kinds of disabilities may have similar functional limitations.

For example: If it is an essential function of a job to press a foot pedal a certain number of times a minute and an individual with a disability applying for the job has some limitation that makes this difficult or impossible, the accommodation process should focus on ways that this person might be able to do the job function, not on the nature of her disability or on how persons with this kind of disability generally might be able to perform the job.