As someone who was thrown into interviewing on day two of my job, and the only training we had on disability and hiring was "You need to ask everybody if they can do the requirements of the job as stated with reasonable accommodation, and you can't ask anything else", I think this is very likely asked in good faith.
It went fine for us until we had an interviewee cock their head and answer, "I dunno, what's a reasonable accommodation for this job?" and we had no idea what to answer.
In this particular situation, we would probably have had to remove certain job duties for this person. Which probably would have worked fine, we could have just shifted things around. But in order to figure that out we would have had to know details of their capabilities, which we weren't supposed to ask about in the interview. And as the interviewer I was not empowered to make decisions about job duties, and also had no idea what I was supposed to, or allowed to, say in the interview other than the required question. They decided to withdraw on their own - which I hope wasn't down to our reaction, but I don't know. If they hadn't we would have had to go to the manager, who would probably have gone to HR, who would probably have kicked it right back to us because they are terrible with questions like that.
I suspect the closest to a universal answer is that if there is no way for them to do the job as stated in the job description without fundamentally changing the nature of the job, then from a legal standpoint you can say there is no reasonable accommodation. But nearly all job descriptions at my level include "other duties as assigned" so that's useless, and there are a lot of people working here who are excused from certain duties for disability reasons. So it actually comes down to, is there an accommodation the applicant is willing to self-advocate for and/or that the employer is willing to offer, 'reasonable' or not?
no subject
It went fine for us until we had an interviewee cock their head and answer, "I dunno, what's a reasonable accommodation for this job?" and we had no idea what to answer.
In this particular situation, we would probably have had to remove certain job duties for this person. Which probably would have worked fine, we could have just shifted things around. But in order to figure that out we would have had to know details of their capabilities, which we weren't supposed to ask about in the interview. And as the interviewer I was not empowered to make decisions about job duties, and also had no idea what I was supposed to, or allowed to, say in the interview other than the required question. They decided to withdraw on their own - which I hope wasn't down to our reaction, but I don't know. If they hadn't we would have had to go to the manager, who would probably have gone to HR, who would probably have kicked it right back to us because they are terrible with questions like that.
I suspect the closest to a universal answer is that if there is no way for them to do the job as stated in the job description without fundamentally changing the nature of the job, then from a legal standpoint you can say there is no reasonable accommodation. But nearly all job descriptions at my level include "other duties as assigned" so that's useless, and there are a lot of people working here who are excused from certain duties for disability reasons. So it actually comes down to, is there an accommodation the applicant is willing to self-advocate for and/or that the employer is willing to offer, 'reasonable' or not?