The Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments Act (ADAAA), by expanding the definition of disability, has broadened the scope of who is covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to include an increased number of individuals with learning disabilities. The regulations interpreting the ADAAA state that a “physical or mental impairment” now means “[a]ny mental or psychological disorder, such as an intellectual disability (formerly termed ‘mental retardation’), organic brain syndrome, emotional or mental illness, and specific learning disabilities.”1 As a result, federal courts currently and in the future will be grappling more frequently with the question of what accommodations are reasonable for employees with learning disabilities, a complex and sometimes poorly understood range of disorders that affect approximately 15 million Americans.2
With the possible exception of dyslexiaessentially a disorder that involves difficulties with reading and reading comprehensionlearning disabilities are conditions that relatively few people are even aware of. They consist of such disorders as dyscalculia (difficulty understanding and working with numbers and mathematical operations); auditory perceptual deficit (an impaired ability to receive accurate information from one’s sense of hearing); dyspraxia (an impairment where messages from the brain are not properly transmitted to the body, resulting in difficulty managing time and a tendency to lose objects); and visual perceptual deficit (inability to receive and process information received from one’s sense of sight). Learning disabilities are a lifelong condition and cannot be cured.
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