Disability Pride Month: Why Accessible Workplaces Are Just Better-Designed Workplaces

Every July, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) gets a birthday. It was signed into law on July 26, 1990, and its anniversary is the reason Disability Pride Month happens in July. Most companies mark the occasion with a social post and an internal newsletter blurb. Fewer ask what the ADA was actually responding to: workplaces, buildings, and systems that were designed around a narrow assumption of who a "normal" worker is.

That assumption didn't disappear in 1990. It just moved. It's less visible in ramps and door widths now and more visible in how performance gets measured, how feedback gets delivered, and who gets the benefit of the doubt when something looks like underperformance.

That's the conversation worth having this month. Not "are we compliant," but "did we design this system for everyone, or just for the people it was easiest to design for?"

The employment gap nobody puts in the strategy deck

Start with the numbers, because they're stark enough to justify the attention.

In 2025, 22.8% of people with a disability were employed, compared with 65.2% of people without a disability, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Unemployment among people with disabilities also runs meaningfully higher: 8.3% versus 4.1%.

Look closer at working-age adults and the picture gets sharper. Research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that among people ages 25 to 54, more than 83% of those without a disability were employed, compared with only about 45% of those with a disability — a gap larger than the employment gaps by race, ethnicity, gender, or even education level.

This isn't a hiring problem alone. A lot of it is a retention and advancement problem, and that's where performance systems come in.

Why so few employees ever tell you

Most organizations underestimate how many employees on their teams are already managing a disability, because most employees never say so.

Roughly 70% to 80% of disabilities are non-visible — chronic illness, mental health conditions, learning differences, sensory processing differences, and more. And even when employees do experience a disability, disclosure at work is far from automatic. One widely cited study found that only 39% of employees with disabilities had disclosed to a manager, and fewer still had told their broader team.

The reasons are consistent across research: fear of being seen as less capable, fear of stalled promotions, fear of a manager quietly recalibrating their opinion of someone's potential. In an employment audit study, applicants who disclosed a disability received 26% fewer expressions of employer interest than otherwise-identical applicants who didn't.

That means every performance conversation, every calibration session, and every promotion decision in most companies is happening with incomplete information. Managers are making evidence-based calls about people while missing some of the most relevant evidence — because the system hasn't made it safe to share it.

Accessibility is a design decision, not a budget line

The most persistent myth about disability inclusion is that it's expensive. It usually isn't.

The Department of Labor's Job Accommodation Network surveyed more than 3,500 employers between 2019 and 2022 and found that 49% of workplace accommodations cost nothing at all to implement. Of the accommodations that did have a cost, the median one-time expense was just $300.

A flexible meeting format. A written summary after a verbal conversation. An asynchronous check-in option instead of a mandatory live one. None of that requires a procurement cycle. It requires a system that was built to flex in the first place.

And the return on that flexibility is well documented. Accenture's research with Disability:IN, based on 346 companies benchmarked through the Disability Equality Index, found that companies leading in disability inclusion generated 1.6 times more revenue, 2.6 times more net income, and were 25% more likely to outperform peers on productivity.

The business case has been sitting in plain sight for years. What's often missing is the system that puts it into practice.

The bigger issue: performance management wasn't built to flex

Here's where this connects to something Betterworks talks about often: most performance management wasn't designed to capture how real work actually gets done. It was designed around a single annual moment, a single format, and a manager's memory of the last several months.

That model is hard on everyone. It's especially hard on employees whose contributions don't always look the same week to week, whose communication style doesn't match a manager's default assumptions, or whose disability means the "typical" way of demonstrating effort — showing up in every meeting, responding instantly, working the same hours as everyone else — simply isn't how they do their best work.

An episodic, memory-based review cycle rewards visibility and conformity. It has a much harder time rewarding outcomes.

That's exactly the gap continuous, evidence-based performance management is meant to close. When feedback and check-ins happen continuously and in writing, instead of being reconstructed from memory once a year, a manager's judgment has more to stand on than a general impression. The record reflects what someone actually did and delivered — not just how memorable, available, or similar-to-the-manager they happened to be.

Managers are the real accessibility layer

Buildings have ramps. Software has screen readers. Performance management has managers — and they're the layer where accessibility either works or quietly fails.

A manager who assumes silence in a meeting means disengagement, instead of considering that a direct message might work better for that employee, is making an accessibility decision without realizing it. A manager who only recognizes contributions made out loud, in real time, is designing recognition around one communication style and calling it a performance standard.

This is why manager effectiveness is inseparable from disability inclusion. Managers need:

• Structured, evidence-based context before a coaching conversation, so judgment isn't filling gaps that data should fill

• Multiple ways for employees to share progress and feedback, not just one default format

• Visibility into patterns across a team, so one person's accommodation isn't mistaken for an exception to a rule everyone else is held to

• Clear goals that describe the outcome, not the method, so employees have room to get there in the way that works for them

None of this requires a manager to know an employee's diagnosis. It requires a system that gives managers evidence instead of assumptions.

Where AI actually helps — and where it needs a human in the loop

AI is already showing up in how goals get set, how feedback gets summarized, and how performance narratives get assembled. Used carefully, that can be a genuine accessibility win: AI-generated summaries can help a manager see patterns in someone's contributions across weeks of check-ins and feedback, instead of relying on whatever happens to be memorable from a single conversation.

Used carelessly, the same technology can flatten the exact nuance that made an accommodation necessary in the first place. AI should help surface a fuller, more current picture of someone's work. It shouldn't be treated as a substitute for a manager's judgment, and it should never be the sole basis for a decision about someone's performance or potential. The goal is a system that helps managers see more, not a system that decides for them.

From compliance to advantage

Disability Pride Month and the ADA anniversary are a good annual prompt. But the underlying question isn't seasonal: does your performance system depend on employees looking, communicating, and working the same way — or does it hold up regardless of how someone gets to the outcome?

Compliance asks whether you've met the minimum legal standard. Good design asks whether the system works for the person actually using it. Betterworks' point of view is that those shouldn't be two different bars. A performance system built around continuous, evidence-based decisions rather than memory and conformity tends to be more accurate, more defensible, and fairer to every employee it touches — not only the ones whose accommodation needs are visible.

That's not a Disability Pride Month talking point. It's just better design.