Damar Services Pays $65K Over Deaf Rejection

Damar Services, an Indianapolis provider of residential services for people with developmental disabilities, will pay $65,000 to settle an EEOC disability discrimination suit after a hiring manager rejected a deaf applicant for a housekeeper role the moment his disability came up on a phone screen.

The applicant interviewed for the position on March 1, 2023. According to the EEOC complaint, once the interviewer learned he was deaf, Damar told him it could not accommodate the condition and ended his candidacy, despite the fact that housekeeping duties did not require hearing to perform. The agency also found Damar had been asking prohibited medical questions during interviews and kept vision and hearing standards on the books that screened out otherwise qualified candidates before they ever reached a formal accommodation conversation.

The consent decree, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana (case 1:26-cv-00575-MPB-TAB), runs two years. Damar must strip the vision and hearing requirements from its job postings, retrain hiring staff, bring in a vocational rehabilitation specialist to review its facilities, and report back to the EEOC on compliance.

“Employers must satisfy strict requirements if they impose a qualification standard that screens out an individual with a disability,” said Kenneth Bird, regional attorney for the EEOC’s Indianapolis District.

For talent acquisition leaders, the failure point here is rarely the accommodation conversation itself. It is the screening question asked before anyone gets that far. An ATS or interview guide that still carries blanket sensory requirements, rather than function-specific ones tied to actual job tasks, produces exactly this fact pattern: a candidate rejected on the spot, with no individualized assessment on record.

The original insight: standardized qualification language written years ago for legal cover now does the opposite. Blanket “must be able to hear/see” clauses on job postings are themselves the evidence trail regulators point to, not a shield against liability. Auditing requisition templates for function-specific, task-based language is now a cheaper fix than a settlement and retraining mandate.

Source: U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission