What the Law Asks of Your Staff Systems

A private employer owes an accommodation, not a technical standard. Nothing in employment law names WCAG, a version, or a conformance level for the systems your staff use. What it does say is that failing to make reasonable accommodations to the known limitations of a qualified employee or applicant is discrimination, unless you can show the accommodation would be an undue hardship. That is a duty to one person, triggered by something you know about them, and answerable by any means that works.

So the honest answer to whether your intranet is compliant is that compliant is the wrong word for it. There is no line to be over. There is a person who cannot do their job, a request, and what you did next. Two situations break that pattern and both are worth knowing, because in each of them a staff system does carry a real technical standard. One is US federal agencies. The other is European public sector bodies.

Why an Intranet Is a Different Problem From a Storefront

A storefront duty runs to everybody who might arrive. You have no idea who is coming, so the only way to meet it is to build for all of them in advance, which is exactly what a conformance level is for. An accommodation duty runs to a person whose limitation you already know about. You do know who is coming. They work here.

That difference decides how the work gets planned. A storefront program runs off a deadline, because the standard and the date both exist before anyone complains. A staff program runs off a request, and a request arrives with a name, a job, and a start date attached. The awkward part is that the request usually arrives after the system was bought, which is why the cheapest moment to think about this is during procurement and the most expensive one is during onboarding.

It also changes what good looks like. Meeting a standard is measurable and provable. Meeting an accommodation duty is neither, because the test is whether this person can now do the job. You can pass an audit and still fail somebody, and you can fail an audit and still have accommodated them properly. Both of those are real outcomes and neither is a paradox.

What a Private US Employer Actually Owes

ADA Title I makes it discrimination to fail to make reasonable accommodations to the known physical or mental limitations of an otherwise qualified individual with a disability who is an applicant or an employee, unless the employer can demonstrate that the accommodation would impose an undue hardship on the operation of the business. Read that sentence twice, because four separate limits are hiding in it.

• Known. The duty attaches to limitations you know about. It does not require you to guess, and it does not run to people who have told you nothing.
• Otherwise qualified. The person has to be able to do the essential functions of the job, with or without accommodation. Accommodation removes barriers around the work, not the work itself.
• Reasonable. The statute lists what accommodation can include, and one item on that list is the one that reaches software. Acquisition or modification of equipment or devices.
• Undue hardship. Your defense, and you carry it. Undue hardship means significant difficulty or expense, weighed against four listed factors.

The general rule around it is wider than most people expect. It reaches job application procedures, hiring, advancement, discharge, compensation, job training, and other terms, conditions and privileges of employment. A learning management system sits inside job training. A performance review tool sits inside terms and conditions. A payroll portal sits inside compensation. None of those are edge cases and all of them are software somebody bought.

One more provision earns a mention because online assessments are everywhere now. Title I separately requires employment tests to be selected and administered so the result reflects what the test claims to measure, rather than the applicant's impaired sensory, manual or speaking skills. A timed drag-and-drop exercise that measures dexterity while claiming to measure judgment fails that on its own terms, audit or no audit.

Where the US Duty Starts, and Who Sits Under It

Title I binds an employer with 15 or more employees for each working day in each of 20 or more calendar weeks in the current or preceding calendar year. Under that, the federal duty does not apply, though state law very often fills the gap and several states set the threshold lower. The statute also excludes the United States itself, a corporation wholly owned by the US government, an Indian tribe, and a bona fide private membership club exempt under section 501(c).

That first exclusion looks odd until you see where the federal government's own duty went instead. It went somewhere stricter.

The UK Duty Turns On the Same Hinge

Under the Equality Act 2010 the duty to make reasonable adjustments has three requirements, and two of them reach digital work. Where a provision, criterion or practice puts a disabled person at a substantial disadvantage, you take such steps as it is reasonable to have to take to avoid it. Where an auxiliary aid would remove the disadvantage, you take reasonable steps to provide it. And where either of those relates to providing information, the Act says the reasonable steps include steps for making sure the information is provided in an accessible format.

That phrase is as close as UK employment law gets to naming a standard, and it still does not name one. It names the outcome and leaves the method to you. Two other details matter in practice. You cannot make the disabled person pay any part of the cost of complying. And the duty does not arise at all if you do not know, and could not reasonably be expected to know, that the person has a disability and is likely to be put at the relevant disadvantage.

So the American statute says known limitations and the British one says does not know and could not reasonably be expected to know. Different drafting traditions, three decades apart, same hinge. The employer's duty turns on what the employer knows. Which means the single most useful thing you can do is make it easy and safe to tell you.

The EU Says It in One Sentence

Council Directive 2000/78/EC covers all persons, in both the public and private sectors, in relation to access to employment, vocational training, working conditions, and membership of workers' organizations. Its Article 5 requires employers to take appropriate measures, where needed in a particular case, to let a person with a disability access, participate in, or advance in employment, unless those measures would be a disproportionate burden.

Same shape again. The phrase where needed in a particular case does the work that known limitations does in the American text. There is one clause with no American equivalent, and it is worth knowing if you operate in Europe. The burden is not disproportionate where it is sufficiently remedied by measures already available under the member state's disability policy. Where a national scheme pays for the adaptation, you cannot call the adaptation too expensive.

Two Places Where a Staff System Does Get a Standard

Everything above is a duty owed to a person. These two are duties owed to a specification, and if you are in either of them your intranet is not a special case at all.

US Federal Agencies, Under Section 508

Section 508 requires every federal department and agency, the Postal Service included, to make the technology it develops, buys, maintains or uses allow federal employees with disabilities access to and use of information and data comparable to what employees without disabilities get. Members of the public get their own clause right underneath. The employee clause comes first. That is the one place in American law where a staff system carries WCAG 2.0 Level AA by regulation rather than by argument.

Undue burden does not switch the duty off there either. Where meeting the standard would be an undue burden, the agency still has to get the same information and data to the person by an alternative means of access they can actually use.

EU Public Bodies, After September 23, 2019

The Web Accessibility Directive excludes intranet and extranet content, and the exclusion has a date on it. The exclusion reaches only content published before September 23, 2019, and even then only until the site undergoes a substantial revision. So content published from that date onward is inside the directive, and older content joins it the next time the site is rebuilt. For a European public body that means the staff portal answers to EN 301 549 V3.2.1 and therefore to WCAG 2.1 Level AA, on the same terms as the public site.

There is a separate encouragement in the directive's reasoning for member states to extend it further into workplace systems, and that one is a permission rather than a duty. Do not confuse the two. The dated exclusion binds. The encouragement does not.

The Careers Page Is the Exception to All of This

Every duty above turns on knowing who the person is. A careers page is where that breaks, because the people using it are strangers and the law knows it. ADA Title I's general rule names job application procedures explicitly, and the UK's Schedule 8 extends the duty to an applicant and to a person who has merely notified you that they may apply.

So a hiring flow behaves like a storefront and not like an intranet. You cannot wait for a request, because a candidate who cannot complete your application does not send you a request. They close the tab and you never learn their name. That is the one staff-adjacent system where building to a standard in advance is the only strategy that works, and it is usually the system nobody has tested.

The One Number Anybody Publishes

The government that does hold itself to a standard for staff systems also measures itself, and the number is public. The FY2024 Governmentwide Section 508 Assessment put intranet conformance at 52 percent, down from 59 percent the year before, with the governmentwide conformance index falling from 1.79 to 1.74 on a five-point scale.

That means the one organization in America under a legal obligation to make its staff systems meet WCAG is getting worse at it, on its own published figures. If you were wondering whether internal systems drift when nobody is looking, that is your answer, and it comes from the party with the strongest reason to report otherwise.

What to Do Before Somebody Asks

None of this is a reason to audit your whole intranet to Level AA tomorrow. It is a reason to be ready for the request that is coming, and to stop buying software that makes the request impossible to grant.

1. 1Ask your vendors for an accessibility conformance report before you sign, not after. A VPAT or ACR at renewal time costs you nothing and tells you whether an accommodation will be possible at all.
2. 2Test the hiring flow properly, because it behaves like a storefront. Apply for one of your own jobs with the keyboard only. If you cannot finish, neither can a candidate, and they will not write to tell you.
3. 3Write down how somebody asks. The duty turns on what you know, so an unclear route to asking is not a shield, it is a delay you pay for later.
4. 4Fix the tools people cannot avoid first. Payroll, expenses, leave requests and the learning system are used by everybody and refused by nobody, which makes them the highest-value things on the list.
5. 5Keep the record. Undue hardship and disproportionate burden are defenses you have to demonstrate, and demonstrating them a year later without notes is close to impossible.

Where This Page Stops

Three things we could not source, said plainly rather than glossed over.

• Whether the DOJ's Title II web rule reaches a public entity's staff-facing content. The regulation text was unreachable when we checked, so this page says nothing about whether a city's intranet sits inside the April 2027 and April 2028 deadlines. If you run a US state or local government, that is the question to put to counsel first.
• What Ireland's employment duty currently requires. The section was rewritten in 2004 to transpose the EU directive and we have read only the original 1998 text, so this page does not describe the current test.
• Whether any court anywhere has held an inaccessible intranet to be a failure to accommodate. We have not researched the case law and are not going to imply an answer.

And the general limit, which applies to the whole page. This is how the duties are written, not advice about your situation. Whether a particular system, a particular request or a particular refusal lands on the wrong side of any of them is a question for an employment lawyer in your jurisdiction, and that is where our job ends and theirs begins.