Because disability is not stable, making a workplace or a classroom accessible is not a “one and done” endeavor. The concept of “accommodations” certainly implies that accessibility is about making one or two tweaks to an environment and then moving on, but that idea is based on an ableist idea of disability as stable.

Here are some specific actions you can take to make a workplace or classroom more accessible:

1. Regularly give people the opportunity to tell you how you can make the workplace/classroom more accessible. Ask everyone, not just the folks you know are disabled. This is for a couple of reasons: first, people with disabilities may not have disclosed them to you for many reasons (I’ll write more about this at some point, but for now, you can check out this), and second, disability isn’t stable, so even if you’ve had this conversation before, the accommodations you may have in place may not be the ones a person needs now. People without disabilities also benefit from these regular conversations, as many of the so-called accommodations for disabled people actually make a space or experience more accessible for everyone. For example, although my hearing is fine, I often find subtitles helpful for when I space out for a moment during a film, my dogs are barking during a critical moment, or I am hearing an accent unfamiliar to me.  
2. If you use a form for people to RSVP to events, include a question about what you can do to make the event accessible to the person RSVPing. Again, this will benefit everything attending. When I’ve asked this question, I’ve often received great ideas about how to improve the event that go way beyond accommodating for disability, such as ways to make introverts feel more comfortable speaking to the group—or even better, ways to respect introverts’ desire to not have to speak to the group.
3. If you meet with students or employees individually on a regular basis, build into your meetings a question about what you can do to make the workplace or classroom more accessible to them. Again, this will benefit everyone, not just the folks with disabilities.
4. When people do ask for an accommodation, don’t ask why they need it or if they really need it. Don’t ask if they’ve tried that thing you read about last week or the thing a friend of yours tried that was super helpful. Just do your best to offer the accommodation. If you can’t provide the accommodation yourself, reach out to HR or the disabilities services center for help.
5. Don’t worry about the name of the disability being accommodated for. If someone says they need wide and clear walkways but they appear able-bodied to you, don’t worry about it. If someone says they need large print handouts but they appear to you to have normal vision, don’t worry about it. For one thing, no one is required to tell you what their disability is. For another, disabilities occur on a spectrum and your ideas about what a mobility challenge looks like may be based on faulty assumptions.
6. If you think you can’t provide the accommodation, see if you actually can. For example, my students last semester asked for a break during our 75 minute class. I typically run out of time in my classes, so the idea of giving up even 5 minutes “to do nothing” felt impossible. But I tried it. And guess what? With the break, folks were more engaged and we got just as much done. Yes, people came back late from the break sometimes. It was messy. But you know what? It was messy without the break, too, only I didn’t know it because it wasn’t messy for me. But my goal as a teacher is to make things less messy for learners, not for me.
7. Recognize that folks may have a hard time identifying what they need for accessibility. As I said in my last post, I found myself struggling to identify what my daughter needed most of the time she was in high school, regularly asking for what would have helped in the last situation rather than in the current situation. It can be helpful to adopt a spirit of problem-solving or trial-and-error.
8.  Model identifying and asking for the support you need so that folks who don’t know how to do it can learn. Talk explicitly about how you have asked for changes to be made in workplaces or classrooms. This provides guidance for other folks and also normalizes asking for support. Whether or not you are disabled, you have probably at some point asked a boss, colleague, professor, or classmate to do something differently to make success more possible for you—talk about it. You might talk about how you asked someone to reschedule a meeting for a time when you are more alert, or how you requested that the IT department deviate from the standard issue software or laptop to make your computer better suited to you, or the time you suggested a different timeline for a project to avoid being stretched too thin.

All of these suggestions boil down to acknowledging that one-size-does-not-fit-all, inviting feedback, and then trying to act on the feedback. Ideally, you are a professor or workplace supervisor because you want people to succeed, so having these conversations about what folks need to attain success should align well already with what you’re doing.