Labor & Employment Law Daily Wrap Up, DISCRIMINATION—DISABILITY—D.D.C.: Blind VA employee advances lawsuit over non-accessible electronic health record system, (Jul 14, 2025)

By Marjorie Johnson, J.D.

She claimed the new system did not meet the Rehabilitation Act’s accessibility requirements for electronic technology and that she was denied an accommodation that would allow her to work independently.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) failed to win dismissal of a lawsuit brought by a blind social worker alleging the agency violated Sections 508 and 501 of the Rehabilitation Act by deploying a new electronic health record system (EHR) that was incompatible with the screen-reader software that had been allowing her to independently perform the essential functions of her job, and then failing to grant her requests for a reasonable accommodation. A federal district court in the District of Columbia rejected the VA’s contention of a lack of Article III standing and concluded that the agency’s “undue burden” and “best meets” affirmative defenses and other factual arguments were improper at the pleadings stage (Santos v. Collins, No. 1:24-cv-01759-JDB (D.D.C. July 10, 2025)).

Screen-reader software for the blind. The employee worked at a VA facility in Oregon for over a decade, and since 2019 was employed as its Visual Impairment Services Team coordinator. In this role, she was responsible for coordinating all services for visually impaired veterans and service members and their families. The facility originally used an EHR called the Computerized Patient Record System (CPRS), which was compatible with a screen-reader software called Job Access With Speech (JAWS). Because JAWS allows blind individuals to review printed materials on computers and other technological devices, she was able to use CPRS to independently perform the essential functions of her job.

New system incompatible. In 2008, Congress enacted the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which required that VA and the Department of Defense (DoD) make their EHRs interoperable—a directive Congress reaffirmed and clarified in 2014 and 2020. To fulfill this mandate, VA decided to acquire the EHR that DoD uses—Oracle Cerner EHR (the Cerner System). The blind community expressed strong concerns about the risk of VA adopting the Cerner System, but when the agency decided to adopt the system in 2018 it only included in the contract an ex post requirement that the system be compatible in the future. VA then did not require Cerner—or its corporate successor Oracle—to immediately comply with that part of the contract and knew the system was not compatible with screen-reader software.

Deployed anyway. Beginning in early 2020, the employee began to raise concerns about the Cerner System’s screen-reader compatibility, which had been confirmed by numerous audits. Nevertheless, the agency declined to postpone the rollout and deployed the system at her facility and one other VA location in June 2022. As a result, she could no longer independently fulfill her computer-related duties and had to delegate those tasks to a sighted assistant and supervisor.

Accommodation request. She requested an accommodation in the form of “full access to an EHR system that is accessible and compatible with JAWS,” but VA did not fulfill that request. Instead, it allowed her to continue to use CPRS in a read-write-only format with assistance from sighted individuals, which allegedly still left her unable to independently perform the essential functions of her job or to handle anything close to the workload she previously completed.

Lawsuit. She eventually brought this lawsuit under the Rehabilitation Act alleging: (1) VA’s procurement and use of the Cerner System violated Section 508 because the system was incompatible with JAWS; and (2) VA violated Section 501 by failing to provide her a reasonable accommodation. VA moved to dismiss her complaint both for lack of subject matter jurisdiction and failure to state a claim.

Standing. Rejecting VA’s contention that she lacked Article III standing, the court found that she met the injury-in-fact requirement by alleging that her sighted colleagues could perform their jobs independently while she—because she was blind—could not, and this unequal treatment caused her stigmatic and emotional harm. She also alleged that this harm was caused by VA’s rollout of the JAWS-incompatible Cerner System (the Section 508 claim) and its failure to provide her with a reasonable accommodation (the Section 501 claim). Finally, the harm would be redressed by an injunction, a declaration, and damages.

Though VA argued that her injury was caused by Oracle and/or Congress, the court explained that the causation requirement does not mandate that the challenged conduct be the only cause of a plaintiff’s harm. Moreover, VA acted autonomously by procuring a noncompliant EHR and then rolling it out despite the continued noncompliance, and “VA cannot use a contract to hide from its statutory obligations.” Similarly, Congress wasn’t the sole cause of the employee’s injury, nor did its statutory mandate prevent an injunction against VA from redressing that injury.

Sovereign immunity. However, the court held that Section 1981(a) does not explicitly waive VA’s sovereign immunity from punitive damages in Section 501 claims, and therefore dismissed her bid for punitive damages, but declined to dismiss her Section 508 claim for compensatory damages. It also found that she had no right to have a jury try the Section 508 claim.

Viable Section 508 claim. “Section 508 requires agencies to ensure employees with disabilities have access to and use of technology comparable to that of employees without disabilities, and the Revised 508 Standards define the criteria required to satisfy Section 508 and detail exceptions to those criteria, subject to certain conditions and procedures,” the court explained. Here, VA argued that the employee’s Section 508 claim must be dismissed because it met the “undue burden” and “best meets” exceptions. However, these affirmative defenses were improperly raised at the pleadings stage.

The court also rejected VA’s alternative argument that the Section 508 claim was precluded by the NDAA, noting that VA did not point to any text in either law that was “positively repugnant” to the text of the other. While it might be possible that the NDAA’s interoperability requirement made complying with both it and Section 508 difficult, and such an argument might support VA’s contention that it satisfied the Section 508’s undue burden exception, as explained such an argument was improper at this stage and could be made after discovery in a motion for summary judgment.

Viable Section 501 claim. The court also rejected VA’s contention that the employee’s Section 501 claim must be dismissed because it was duplicative of her Section 508 claim, noting that [m]any civil cases contain multiple counts that seek nearly identical relief based on different legal theories but essentially the same facts.” VA also argued that she failed to plausibly allege that the agency denied her request for a reasonable accommodation since it intends to ensure the Cerner System be made JAWS compatible but had “little to no control” over how long it would take Oracle to make that happen. Alternatively, it argued that it did provide a reasonable accommodation by providing her a full-time sighted assistant and read-write only access to CPRS. However, both arguments raised factual questions that the court could not resolve on a motion to dismiss, and that VA could raise again at the summary judgment stage.

The case is No. 1:24-cv-01759-JDB.

Judge: Bates, J.

Attorneys: Anisha Shanae Queen (Brown, Goldstein & Levy) for Laurette Santos. Christina O'Tousa, U.S. Department of Justice, for Denis McDonough.

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