Loud & Clear

Loud & Clear, September 29, 2026. By Felicia Nurmsen, Founder & CEO, Inclusion Without Illusion

In this issue

On Wednesday, September 23, a federal judge removed the community integration provisions from a federal disability rights rule, at the federal government’s request. Section 504, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the Supreme Court’s Olmstead decision remain in place. The feature looks at what changed, what did not, and what this could mean for people who need services to live at home, their families, and their workplaces.

September is Deaf Awareness Month. I look at the latest deaf employment numbers and a hiring question employers can answer for themselves: can a deaf candidate complete your automated interview?

On the Radar is agentic AI in recruiting: software that can carry out a sequence of hiring steps without a person approving each one. The Solutions Playbook gives employers eight ways to test whether their interview process works for a deaf candidate.

Feature

Intentional Chaos and What It Costs

Eighteen months of federal decisions have moved in one direction. Executive Order 11246, signed in 1965, was revoked on January 21, 2025. The Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs stopped holding contractors to affirmative action obligations, placed disability and veteran complaints in abeyance for roughly six months, and administratively closed every pending review. The 2025 budget law cut federal Medicaid spending by an estimated 911 billion dollars over a decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office. In June 2026, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel said neither the Americans with Disabilities Act nor Section 504 requires states to serve people with mental disabilities in the most integrated setting. In July, the department stopped relying on its own 2011 guidance on Olmstead. On August 21, 2026, the Labor Department published three final rules rewriting federal contractor obligations. On September 21, the requirement to ask applicants and employees whether they have a disability ended, along with the seven percent hiring goal. On October 26, the Executive Order 11246 regulations come off the books entirely.

Each step arrived with its own explanation. Taken together, they remove measurement, enforcement, and funding from disability employment at the same time, and they leave employers, employees, and HR teams guessing at what is required of them. The cost of that confusion lands on people who need the systems to work.

The Latest Change

On September 23, a federal judge signed an order removing the community integration provisions from the Department of Health and Human Services’ 2024 Section 504 rule. The federal government and the states still involved in the lawsuit asked the court to do it. The ruling applies nationwide.

Section 504 is the part of the Rehabilitation Act that prohibits disability discrimination by organizations receiving federal funding. The provisions the court removed addressed whether people with disabilities can receive services in their homes and communities instead of being unnecessarily placed in institutions.

That sounds like a narrow legal change until you think about the question underneath it. Who gets to decide where a person lives, and what does it take to challenge that decision?

What Changed and What Is Still Law

Section 504 is still law. The Americans with Disabilities Act is still law. Olmstead v. L.C., the Supreme Court decision recognizing that unjustified segregation of disabled people can be discrimination, still stands. The court did not rule that the right to community living is unconstitutional or invalid.

What disappeared is federal regulatory language explaining how organizations covered by the Department of Health and Human Services must put that right into practice. Other parts of the 2024 rule remain in place, including provisions addressing medical treatment, accessible medical equipment, and web and mobile accessibility.

I want to be precise about this because our rights have not been eliminated.

Enforcement still matters. A right means something different when the government actively presses organizations to follow it than when an individual has to find a lawyer and fight for it, possibly for years.

Why I Take This Personally

My paternal grandmother was institutionalized at Bellevue in New York City for seven years without her consent. During that time, she was given a lobotomy, also without her consent.

My father was born in 1940. My grandmother’s institutionalization happened decades before Section 504, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and Olmstead existed.

Her story shows what can happen when the people making decisions about someone else’s life are not held accountable, and there are no guardrails to begin with to protect the individual.

The ruling does not return us to my grandmother’s time, and I will not claim it does. We have laws now that did not exist for her. The rules and the people responsible for enforcing those laws still matter. A right that depends entirely on an individual’s ability to bring a lawsuit is a right people will be able to use unevenly.

Like so many of us, my grandmother could not afford or even find a lawyer to help her.

Systemic Failure Already Exists and Institutional Bias Is Real

While my disabilities do not require assistance at home, many of us do need that assistance for things like getting dressed, preparing meals, and getting through the day. Medicaid-funded home and community-based services can make it possible for someone to live at home instead of in a nursing facility or another institution.

There is a problem built into the system. Nursing facility care is generally a required Medicaid benefit. Many services that allow people to remain at home are optional for states and can have enrollment limits. People who work in Medicaid sometimes call this the institutional bias.

(To learn more about how I feel about nursing home care, read my LinkedIn newsletter, The Missing Conversation During Disability Pride Month. Nobody should be required to live in that environment, and it will only get worse.)

The demand for home care already exceeds what states provide. KFF, a health policy research organization, found more than 600,000 people on waiting or interest lists for Medicaid home and community-based services in 2025. People who did reach waiver services waited an average of 32 months, and 63 months on waivers serving autistic people. Some people on those lists receive other forms of home care while they wait. Many spend those years without the support they need, and an institution is the option the system reliably funds.

Now picture what a disruption in services means in an ordinary week.

An employee cannot get the assistance they need to get dressed and leave home, so they miss work. A spouse changes their shift to step in. An adult child uses leave to cover a gap in care. A friend starts making daily trips because there is nobody else.

To an employer, some of that may look like an attendance or performance issue. The cause may be a breakdown in services outside the workplace.

No job accommodation can replace the assistance someone needs to get out of bed in the morning, and no recruiting campaign can reach someone who cannot get the services they need to live and work in their community.

Nothing in the ruling requires a state to institutionalize anyone. The legal protections against unnecessary segregation remain. With part of the federal regulatory framework removed, it matters even more whether states and service providers honor those protections in practice.

What Employers Should Do With This

If your organization receives federal health or human services funding, do not assume your obligations disappeared. Have your legal team review how your organization applies Section 504, the ADA, and Olmstead in its decisions about services and discharge planning.

If you employ people who rely on community services, remember that a sudden change in attendance or availability may reflect a service disruption. That does not mean making assumptions about an employee’s disability or private life. It means responding to the situation in front of you and having a workable accommodation process.

If you lead an organization with employees across multiple states, pay attention to state decisions about home care. Those decisions affect employees, candidates, family caregivers, and the communities where you operate.

Community integration can sound like a legal concept. In real life, it means having a home, going to work, seeing friends, taking part in your community, and having control and personal autonomy in your life.

Awareness Recognition

Are You Screening In or Screening Out Deaf Candidates?

September is Deaf Awareness Month in the United States. International Week of Deaf People ran September 21 to 27 under the theme “Declaring Deaf People’s Human Rights.” The World Federation of the Deaf is also marking its 75th anniversary this year.

The latest United States employment figures tell a mixed story.

The National Deaf Center reports that 57.7 percent of deaf adults are employed, the highest rate recorded in its dashboard. Deaf employment has grown over the past decade. The employment gap between deaf and hearing adults remains more than 15 percentage points.

Among adults working full time, deaf and hearing workers have the same median annual income of 60,000 dollars. That does not mean every deaf worker has the same experience. It does challenge an assumption that deaf people cannot perform or earn at the same level when they have access to full-time work.

The numbers do not prove that hiring is the only barrier. They do give employers a reason to examine who can get through the hiring process.

The Interview I Walked Away From

I have had trouble with my ears since childhood, and I will eventually lose all hearing in my left ear.

I waited a long time to get hearing aids, mostly out of vanity and internalized ageism. Meanwhile, I was working harder and harder to follow people: concentrating, watching their faces, filling in words from context, and asking them to repeat themselves. What finally pushed me to get hearing aids was a colleague I worked with closely whose voice, at its particular pitch, I could not hear at all.

Years before that, when I was nineteen and interviewing in New York City through an agency, I could not hear the interviewer. I was already using context, familiar speech patterns, and the movement of someone’s mouth to fill the gaps. His accent took away some of those patterns, and the gaps became too wide for me to cover.

I asked him to repeat himself so many times that I finally ended the interview, told him the job was not a good fit, and walked out.

He never rejected me. I withdrew.

Whatever the agency wrote down, it probably recorded a candidate who turned down a role. It would not have shown why.

Hearing aids helped. They did not make every voice clear. I can adjust the volume and balance between my ears using my phone, which is remarkable technology. A voice at the wrong pitch can still be hard for me to understand, and I cannot ask a recorded interview prompt to repeat itself.

I talked more about hearing aids and the technology I use on Humans Meet Tech, in When Technology Automates Exclusion, and Why It Can’t Fix a Broken System.

The Automated Interview Problem

In March 2025, the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado filed an administrative complaint on behalf of a deaf and Indigenous Intuit employee who had applied for a promotion. According to the complaint, she was required to complete a recorded video interview, requested human-generated captions to access the instructions and questions, was denied, and was not selected for the promotion.

The complaint raised concerns about the use of the interview platform and whether its speech recognition could accurately process the responses of deaf and hard of hearing speakers. Intuit and HireVue disputed the allegations. These are allegations in a complaint, not legal findings. I could not confirm a resolution.

Employers do not have to wait for the outcome of that case to test the question it raises.

If your hiring process includes recorded instructions, video questions, automatic captions, or software that scores spoken responses, can a deaf candidate actually complete it?

Captions that exist but get the questions wrong do not solve the problem. Neither does an accommodation request link that appears only after an automated stage has already screened someone out.

A candidate may leave the process just as I left that interview. Your records may tell you they withdrew. They may not tell you that your process gave them no workable way to continue.

The question for your team this week. Has anyone completed your application and interview process from beginning to end without audio? Reading the vendor’s accessibility statement does not count. The strongest version of this test is to pay deaf people to run your process and tell you where it fails, because a hearing employee working with the sound off is simulating an experience that deaf candidates live. Either way, if nobody has tried it, you do not yet know whether a deaf candidate can finish your process.

On the Radar

Agentic AI Is Here

Some companies now sell “agentic AI” for recruiting. That term can sound complicated. In simple terms, it means AI software that can complete several hiring tasks in a row with little human help.

Depending on the product and its settings, the software may:

  • Search for possible candidates
  • Send messages to candidates
  • Ask screening questions
  • Score or rank applicants
  • Schedule interviews
  • Update the hiring system
  • Move candidates to the next step, or remove them from consideration

A vendor demo may make this look fast and easy. Employers need to ask a more important question: what is the system actually doing in our hiring process?

If a candidate is screened out, can you answer these questions?

  • What happened?
  • What information did the system use?
  • Did a person review the result?
  • Can the company show a clear record explaining why the candidate was removed from the process?

These questions matter for every applicant. They matter even more for disabled applicants.

Where Can Someone Ask for Help?

A disabled candidate may need an accommodation to complete part of the hiring process. For example, they may need extra time on a test, a different way to take an assessment, captions for a video interview, or help using an online system.

In a traditional process, a recruiter might notice when someone cannot finish a step. The recruiter may ask what happened and explain how to request help. An automated system may not do that unless the employer has planned for it.

Imagine an applicant who cannot complete an online assessment because it does not work well with their screen reader. If the system simply records an incomplete assessment, it may give the person a low score or remove them from the process. A recruiter may see only “incomplete” or “not qualified.” They may never learn that the real problem was an access barrier.

That is why employers should not wait for a complaint. They should make it easy for candidates to request an accommodation before the system makes a decision or moves them out of the process.

What the Research Shows

Research presented at the 2026 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems examined disabled workers’ experiences with digitized hiring assessments. The study, Disqualified by Disability: The Exclusion of Disabled Workers Through Digitized Hiring Assessments, used a qualitative, human-centered approach to explore what happened when disabled participants completed simulated digital assessments.

This research does not prove that every hiring tool treats disabled candidates unfairly. It does show why employers must look beyond a vendor’s claims about accuracy, speed, or efficiency. They also need to look at the experience of the person taking the assessment.

  • Can the person use the system?
  • Can they understand the instructions?
  • Can they ask for help?
  • Will someone notice if an access problem affects the result?

Those are not minor details. They can affect who gets a fair chance to compete for a job.

AI Is Already Common in Recruiting

AI use in HR is growing, and it is not yet universal. SHRM reported in 2026 that 39 percent of organizations had implemented AI in their HR functions. Recruiting was the most common use, at 27 percent of organizations.

That does not mean 27 percent of organizations use fully automated or agentic recruiting systems. SHRM’s figures do not separate those tools from other types of recruiting AI.

Still, the numbers matter. They show that recruiting is one of the first places where employers are using AI.

SHRM also found that 52 percent of organizations do not involve HR in AI strategy or vision. That should concern employers, because hiring technology affects people, job access, workplace fairness, and legal risk. HR should be part of decisions about buying, setting up, and checking these systems.

Questions to Send Before a Demo

Before your next vendor demo, send these questions in writing:

  • At what points does a person review an individual candidate?
  • Which steps can the system complete without a person approving each action?
  • Can the system score, rank, reject, or remove a candidate from the process? If it does, what information does it use?
  • What record can we review to understand why a person was screened out?
  • Where can a candidate request an accommodation at every step of the process?
  • What happens if someone cannot complete a test, video interview, chatbot conversation, or online form because of an accessibility barrier?
  • Who is responsible for checking whether the system works fairly for disabled candidates?

The answer matters more than the demo. A fast hiring process is not a good hiring process if qualified people are screened out because they could not access the system.

Solutions Playbook

Eight Controls for an Interview a Deaf Candidate Can Actually Finish

This is a practical test for employers. Start with your own job posting and go through the process the way a candidate would. Bring in the people who own recruiting, accessibility, and accommodations. When you find a barrier, record what it is, assign someone to fix it, and check that the change works.

  1. Complete your own application with the sound off. Start at a public job posting and continue through submission and any automated interview. Include every video, instruction, and chatbot prompt. Write down each point where you have to guess or cannot continue.
  2. Check the instructions, not just the interview questions. A platform may caption the questions but leave the tutorial, practice round, or technical directions without captions. A candidate should not have to figure out the tool before they can access the interview.
  3. Check caption accuracy using your actual content. Read the captions against the script for your interview questions. Pay close attention to names, technical terms, and the details a candidate needs to give a useful answer.
  4. Make the accommodation request available before the first assessment. Put a working way to contact a person on the job posting or invitation. If a candidate can request an interpreter or human captioning only after an automated stage, the request process may arrive too late.
  5. Find out what happens when a candidate does not speak their response. Ask the vendor what its system records and scores if someone signs, types, uses an interpreter, or uses a speech-generating device. Get a specific answer about the product you use.
  6. Separate the way someone communicates from the skill the job requires. Look at what the interview scores: pace, tone, fluency, “communication style,” or “active listening.” For each item, ask whether spoken delivery is an actual job requirement or whether the assessment is confusing one way of communicating with the ability to do the work.
  7. Arrange interpreting before an urgent interview request arrives. A short interview window can close before an American Sign Language interpreter is available. Establish a provider relationship and a clear booking process so the candidate is not left carrying the scheduling problem.
  8. Measure what happens after a request. Track accommodation requests during hiring, how long they take to fulfill, whether candidates can complete each stage, and where people leave the process. Review the information with appropriate privacy protections. Fixing one interview is a start, and knowing whether the process works consistently is the goal.

Start with control one. Complete the process without audio. It will show you where a candidate has to work around the system, and where the system gives them no way through.

The larger question running through this issue is whether people can actually use the rights and opportunities we say they have. That question shows up in a court ruling about living in the community. It shows up in the services an employee needs before they can get to work. It shows up in an interview a candidate leaves because they cannot hear the questions.

Find out where your process breaks. Then fix it.

Sources and further reading