Mis-accommodation

A situation where a disability accommodation that has been formally arranged fails to provide adequate access due to the unpredictability of real-world circumstances, context-specific limitations of the technology, or incorrect assumptions about the accommodation's effectiveness. Coined by Jain, Potluri, and Sharif in their 2020 autoethnographic study of graduate school with disabilities, the term captures how standard accommodations — such as real-time captioning, accessible document formats, or in-class scribes — may not work in spontaneous situations like impromptu meetings, social events, or when technology behaves unpredictably. Mis-accommodations highlight the gap between planned, scheduled accessibility services and the dynamic, unstructured nature of everyday academic and professional life.