You have rewritten the same four-sentence email six times and it still reads wrong. So you paste it into Grammarly, or into ChatGPT with a note asking it to fix the tone, and ninety seconds later the thing goes out sounding like the person your colleagues think you are. Nobody on your team knows this is how the email got written. It has been working quietly for a year.

A Private Workaround Has No Protection

Companies change their minds about AI tools constantly, and almost never with much warning. A security review decides that pasting internal information into a public chatbot is a data risk, and the whole category gets blocked at the firewall. A budget pass drops the Grammarly seats nobody could justify. A new manager arrives with different rules about outside software.

When that happens to someone whose tool was never on record, the effect shows up as a performance problem. Your emails get slower. Your written work goes back to draft six. Your manager sees output that dipped for no visible reason, and there is nothing in your file connecting the dip to a tool that vanished. You end up explaining a disability during a performance conversation, which is the worst possible moment to do it.

Putting the tool on record ahead of time flips that. The company has to talk to you before it takes the tool away.

What Turns Software Into an Accommodation

Under Title I of the Americans with Disabilities Act, an employer with 15 or more employees has to provide reasonable accommodations to a qualified employee with a disability. A reasonable accommodation is any change to how a job gets done that lets you perform the essential functions of that job. Dyslexia and ADHD both meet the ADA definition of disability when they substantially limit a major life activity, and reading, concentrating, thinking, and communicating are all named in the statute as major life activities.

An AI writing assistant sits in the same category as screen-reading software, dictation, a modified schedule, or a noise-reducing headset. There is nothing about software that drafts and edits text that makes it a lesser accommodation than a piece of hardware.

The framing that gets you into trouble is asking for permission to use AI. That sounds like a policy exception, and policy exceptions get denied by people who never think about your job. The framing that works names the job function: producing accurate written communication at the volume and pace the role requires.

Ask for a Function, Then Offer a Menu

Your employer decides which accommodation to provide. They do not have to hand you your favorite product. So make the request about the barrier, then give them several ways to solve it, starting with the cheapest.

A request built this way covers most office roles:

• The barrier. Drafting and proofreading written work takes you substantially longer than it takes colleagues in the same role, and errors survive your own review.
• The options. An enterprise Microsoft 365 Copilot license, a Grammarly Business seat, or a dictation tool such as Dragon. If the company already licenses Microsoft 365, the built-in Editor, Dictate, Read Aloud, and Immersive Reader features cost nothing extra and may resolve most of it.
• The measure. What good looks like once the tool is in place, in terms your manager already uses.

Naming a free option first tends to shorten the conversation considerably. An accommodation that costs nothing is hard to refuse and easy for a manager to approve without escalating.

How Much You Have to Say

You do not have to hand over a diagnosis to start this. What the law asks is that you connect a medical condition to a limitation that affects your work, in enough detail that your employer understands why you need the change. "A condition that affects how I process written language" opens the door.

If your disability and your need for the tool are not obvious, your employer may ask for documentation from a provider confirming the limitation and the need, and that request is legal. What is not legal is a fishing expedition through your unrelated medical history, and the boundaries are worth knowing before you send anything. Our guide to medical inquiries and disability disclosure covers what employers can and cannot ask. If you are still deciding whether to say anything at all, disability disclosure at work walks through the timing.

Anyone who used accommodations in school will find the shift jarring, because no one at work is looking for you. The paperwork trail that followed you through a university disability office ends at graduation, and how accommodations change after college is worth reading before your first request.

If They Say No to the Tool You Wanted

A denial is not the end of the process. Once you have made a request, your employer has to engage in what the ADA calls the interactive process, which means an actual back-and-forth about what would work. They can offer an equally effective alternative instead of your preferred product, and they can refuse an accommodation that would cause undue hardship, a standard that means significant difficulty or expense measured against the size of the organization.

One denial comes up often enough to plan for. If the company bans public AI chatbots because client data cannot leave its systems, that rule is a legitimate business reason that applies to everyone, and no accommodation request will exempt you from it. The productive answer is an approved internal tool that meets the same need inside the security boundary, which is exactly what an enterprise Copilot seat is for. Ask for the compliant version rather than an exception to the data rule.

The Job Accommodation Network runs a free consulting service at askjan.org and 800-526-7234, staffed by people who will talk through your specific job and suggest options by name. Employers call the same line. It is a good number to have before your meeting rather than after it. For the full sequence from first request through appeal, see our guide to requesting workplace accommodations under the ADA.

Send It as an Email

A conversation in a hallway leaves no record, and records are the entire point here. Send a short email to your manager or HR, dated, stating the limitation, the effect on a specific job function, the options you are proposing, and your offer to provide documentation. Save a copy somewhere outside your work account, because company access disappears fast when employment does. If two weeks pass with no answer, reply to your own message and ask about a timeline.

What that email buys is a tool nobody can quietly delete, and a written history that any future manager inherits along with your role. The work you have been producing was always your work. This makes the conditions behind it something your employer knows about and has agreed to.