American Airlines Fired A Blind Reservations Agent After Four Years Of Unpaid Leave — EEOC Sues

American Airlines is being sued by the EEOC because they refused to accommodate a reservations agent who developed blindness. They kept her on unpaid involuntary leave for nearly four years and then terminated her. She wanted to use screen reader software, and they refused. They also failed to find her another position. According to the agency,

• She was hired in reservations in January 2012. Six months later she went on medical leave after an injury that caused permanent cortical blindness.

• Four years later, in December 2016, she asked to return to work. She proposed a part-time schedule and use of screen reader JAWS ‘Job Access With Speech’ which would be provided by the state. Blindness support agencies would assist configuring the software.

• The following month she was told American couldn’t accommodate her in the reservations role, without determining whether the JAWS software could be made compatible with the reservations software. They promised to look into a transfer. She asked about several different roles, but was never considered for any of them.

• After 8 months they contacted National Federation of the Blind regarding use of the screen software and a year and a half to have a third party conduct compatibility testing on the reservations software. That evaluation said the software couldn’t guarantee full accessibility but that it could remediate accessibility issues. American decided not to try to make the reservations software compatible.

• No action to identify or provide accommodations in 2019. Then the pandemic hit, and they terminated her when pandemic subsidy requirements allowed them to do so.

The new fight in this case is over discovery. The EEOC wants to inspect and test American’s software for compatibility with accessibility tools, to see whether they cold have been made to work. That’s a fairly standard request.

American’s defense against the lawsuit would likely argue that the software wouldn’t work, or making it work would have involved unreasonable efforts. So the EEOC wants to test the systems. However,

• American says the case is about events from years ago. The software has changed since then. So testing the current system is irrelevant. (Since the EEOC wants reinstatement, not just back pay, the current system is relevant too.)

• American says the EEOC did not inspect, or even request, software during its four year investigation from 2021 through 2025. That doesn’t mean this is waived, though.

• Plus, they say the software was already tested by a third party, which found the systems weren’t fully compatible and couldn’t be certain to work.

• And meeting the request would require access across 58 pieces of software plus knowledgeable American staff for each one.

It seems fair that testing current software is weak evidence of feasibility from 2016 – 2020. And a request covering dozens of systems is overbroad. And direct access to these systems creates issues with customer data and cybersecurity.

Nonetheless, if American is going to say that accessibility software isn’t compatible then discovery into compatibility makes sense. Limits can be placed on the EEOC to address security, and differences between current and historical versions of software can be documented.

American should be able to limit discovery so that it’s not actually granted to 58 systems. EEOC should be able to test JAWS on reservations software (and, potentially, to systems used by specific alternate jobs that had been suggested).

I have to imagine American’s position will be that the reservations agent was not a “qualified individual” for the job even an accommodation, that custom scripting would not have enabled her to perform essential functions, and making the reservations platform software-compatible would have been an undue hardship. There wasn’t any vacant reassignment position existed for which she was qualified, and that’s why there was such a long leave and ultimately termination.

Notably, though, American and its Envoy Air subsidiary previously settled a nationwide EEOC disability-accommodation lawsuit in 2017 with the EEOC saying the airlines failed to determine whether reasonable accommodations would allow employees to return to work. That’s not proof of liability here, but it makes the EEOC’s focus on a similar accommodation issue unsurprising.