Everything quoted below comes from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's Enforcement Guidance on Reasonable Accommodation and Undue Hardship under the ADA, retrieved from eeoc.gov on September 10, 2026. Enforcement guidance is the Commission's own explanation of how it reads the statute; it is not the statute, courts are not bound by it, and how any of it applies to a particular job and a particular conversation is a question this article cannot answer. Nothing here tells you that a request you made was legally sufficient, and nothing here tells you what to do. For that, an employment lawyer, and for free technical help on accommodations the Job Accommodation Network at askjan.org. Innovative Placements is a connector — we help people with disabilities find work in Western New York — and we are not lawyers.
You need to start an hour later on Tuesdays. There is a medical reason. And the thought of walking into your supervisor's office and saying the word "accommodation" feels enormous — formal, permanent, like opening a file on yourself that never closes.
So most people do the other thing first. They ask casually. "Would it be alright if I came in at ten on Tuesdays?" No forms, no words with weight, nothing that feels irreversible.
That instinct is completely reasonable, and it has a consequence almost nobody knows about, which is the reason for this article.
The Word Is Not What Matters
The Commission's guidance is explicit that a request for accommodation does not require any particular vocabulary:
“When an individual decides to request accommodation, the individual or his/her representative must let the employer know that s/he needs an adjustment or change at work for a reason related to a medical condition.”
“To request accommodation, an individual may use ‘plain English’ and need not mention the ADA or use the phrase ‘reasonable accommodation.’”
And it does not need to be written down:
“Do requests for reasonable accommodation need to be in writing? No. Requests for reasonable accommodation do not need to be in writing. Individuals may request accommodations in conversation or may use any other mode of communication.”
So the ceremony people are trying to avoid was never required. There is no form that starts the process and no phrase that has to be said. Which raises the real question, and it is not the one most people are worried about.
What Actually Divides the Two Routes
The guidance answers it with two of its own examples, and the pair is worth reading side by side.
Example A. “An employee tells her supervisor, ‘I'm having trouble getting to work at my scheduled starting time because of medical treatments I'm undergoing.’ This is a request for a reasonable accommodation.”
Example D. “An employee tells his supervisor that he would like a new chair because his present one is uncomfortable. Although this is a request for a change at work, his statement is insufficient to put the employer on notice that he is requesting reasonable accommodation.”
Neither employee said "accommodation." Neither wrote anything down. Neither invoked a law. The difference between them is one clause: the first connected the request to a medical reason and the second did not.
That is the actual dividing line, and it is not where people think it is. Example A is a casual sentence said in a corridor, and by the Commission's reading it is a request for reasonable accommodation. The employee was not trying to start a process. She started one anyway, because of a clause she probably did not think twice about.
Which Means the Informal Ask Is Two Different Asks
This is the part worth carrying away.
When you ask for a schedule change and give no reason — or give a reason that is not medical — you have asked for a favour. Your employer can say yes, and many will. They can also say no on Tuesday and change their mind on Friday, and nothing attaches to any of it.
When you ask for the same change and say it is for a medical reason, you have, on the Commission's reading, made a request for reasonable accommodation, whatever words you used. The guidance is clear that the employer cannot simply set it aside — it states that the employer “cannot ignore the initial request.”
We are not going to tell you which to use, and specifically we are not going to tell you that keeping quiet is the safer play. Both routes are genuinely available and they differ in what attaches to them.
The favour route asks less of you and gives you less. The accommodation route brings a process with it, and part of that process is that where the disability or the need is not obvious, the guidance says the employer “may ask the individual for reasonable documentation about his/her disability and functional limitations.” That is a real cost and it is the thing people are actually flinching from when they flinch. It is also the price of the request being one the employer has to engage with.
Three Things That Are Genuinely Useful to Know
You are not on a deadline. The guidance states that a person with a disability “may request a reasonable accommodation at any time during the application process or during the period of employment,” and that not having asked earlier does not preclude asking now. The casual ask you made in March does not use up your turn.
Documentation has a boundary. Where an employer may ask for documentation, the guidance describes what that means: “the employer may require only the documentation that is needed to establish that a person has an ADA disability, and that the disability necessitates a reasonable accommodation.” It goes on to say an employer cannot ask for documentation unrelated to determining that. Your whole medical history is not on the table.
You can make it explicit later. Nothing about having asked informally first stops you from returning to the conversation and being clear about what you are asking for and why. If the casual route did not get you anywhere, that is a normal place to be, and it is not a door you closed.
The Honest Summary
Claiming: the word "accommodation" is not the thing that matters, writing is not required, and by the Commission's own examples the deciding factor is whether the ask was connected to a medical reason. So "I will just ask casually and avoid all this" is often not the choice people believe they are making.
Not claiming: that any particular sentence you said was or was not legally sufficient, that one route is safer, or that any of this is settled for your situation. Enforcement guidance is how the agency reads the law, and the reading of any real conversation belongs to a lawyer who has heard the whole thing.
Where to Take It
What happens after a request is made — the back-and-forth, who proposes what, what an employer is weighing — is its own subject, and from the employer's side of the table it is in choosing among effective accommodations. If you have an arrangement already and it has stopped working, that is a different conversation with a different opening and it is covered in reopening the conversation. And if you are returning to work after time away on benefits, expedited reinstatement is the door back.
Every quotation is from the EEOC's Enforcement Guidance on Reasonable Accommodation and Undue Hardship under the ADA, retrieved from eeoc.gov on September 10, 2026. It is the Commission's own document explaining how it enforces the statute, not the statute, and the Commission revises it. If this article ever disagrees with the current published text, trust the current text and tell us.