An Indianapolis provider of residential services for people with developmental disabilities will pay $65,000 to resolve a federal lawsuit accusing it of rejecting a job applicant because he is deaf. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued Damar Services, Inc. after a single phone interview in 2023 in which, the agency says, staff learned the applicant was deaf, told him the company could not accommodate him, and turned him down for a housekeeping position. The case lands on a question that touches any household where someone is deaf, hard of hearing or otherwise disabled and looking for steady work: what a hiring standard is legally allowed to screen for, and what an interviewer is allowed to ask before a job offer is even on the table.
The settlement, filed as a two-year consent decree, does not include an admission of wrongdoing or a court finding that Damar broke the law. It does require the company to rewrite its hiring practices, bring in outside oversight of its facilities and qualification standards, and report back to federal regulators through 2028.
A Phone Interview for a Housekeeping Job
According to the EEOC’s lawsuit, Damar conducted a phone interview on March 1, 2023, with an applicant for a housekeeping position at its Indianapolis operations, which provide residential services to people with developmental disabilities. The agency says that once staff learned during the call that the applicant was deaf, they told him the company could not accommodate the disability and rejected him, despite his ability to perform the job with or without an accommodation. The EEOC filed its lawsuit in March 2026 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana, Indianapolis Division, after first trying to resolve the matter through the agency’s administrative conciliation process.
The lawsuit also alleged that Damar’s application process included medical and disability-related questions barred under the Americans with Disabilities Act, and that its written qualification standards required applicants to communicate verbally and to hear and see “within normal ranges.” Enforced as a blanket rule, a standard like that can screen out categories of disabled applicants before an employer ever considers whether the job could be done with a reasonable accommodation.
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Why a Hearing-and-Vision Requirement Crossed a Line
Federal disability law does not stop an employer from requiring that a job get done. It does restrict how a company defines who is even allowed to apply for it. Under the ADA’s rules on qualification standards, a requirement that screens out someone with a disability generally has to be job-related and consistent with business necessity, and an employer typically has to consider whether a reasonable accommodation would let the person perform the job’s essential functions before ruling the person out entirely. A blanket rule that every applicant hear and see “within normal ranges,” written into a job posting or screening checklist, does not leave room for that individual, case-by-case review — which is what made it a target of the EEOC’s suit.
The Interview Questions Federal Law Restricts
The case also turned on what Damar’s interviewers reportedly asked before extending an offer. Federal rules bar an employer from asking a job applicant to answer disability-related questions or take a medical exam before a job offer is made; a company may only ask whether an applicant can perform the job, and how, with or without an accommodation. Those limits exist to keep a disability from entering a hiring decision at the earliest, least-scrutinized stage of the process — the stage where, the EEOC alleged, Damar’s questions and the deafness disclosure combined to end this applicant’s chance at the job before his qualifications were ever weighed.
What the Two-Year Settlement Requires
Under the consent decree, Damar will pay $65,000 in monetary relief to resolve the case. Beyond the payment, the company agreed to update its written hiring policies to remove vision- and hearing-related requirements from job postings, engage a vocational rehabilitation specialist to review its facilities, policies, procedures and qualification standards, train staff on disability discrimination, post an employee notice explaining workers’ rights under the ADA, and file periodic compliance reports with the EEOC for the two-year life of the decree.
Kenneth Bird, regional attorney for the EEOC’s Indianapolis District Office, said the commission was “appreciative that Damar worked cooperatively to negotiate an early resolution to this suit,” adding that employers “must satisfy strict requirements if they impose a qualification standard that screens out an individual with a disability.” That office has jurisdiction over discrimination charges in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan and parts of Ohio.
Filing a Disability Discrimination Complaint
A worker or applicant who believes a hiring decision, an interview question or a job requirement violated the ADA generally has 180 days from the alleged discrimination to file a charge with the EEOC, a window that can be extended under some state laws. The ADA’s hiring protections apply to employers with 15 or more employees. The EEOC’s disability-related resources page lays out the filing process along with guidance for both applicants and employers navigating the law’s hiring rules, including how accommodation requests are supposed to be evaluated case by case rather than screened out by a fixed physical requirement.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources; where a claim could not be verified from the public record, we say so.
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