His colleagues sold the full suite with territories and training. He got cold calls
The EEOC has sued Solera Holdings, alleging it stripped a visually impaired worker's role to almost nothing - then fired him.
The complaint, filed October 20, 2026 in the US District Court for the District of Maryland, tells a story of an employer that allegedly knew about its worker's disability from day one and still managed to get nearly every part of the accommodation process wrong.
The worker has cone rod dystrophy, a degenerative eye disease that substantially limits his ability to see. He started as a solutions advisor at DealerSocket in January 2021, working remotely from his home in Bel Air, Maryland. When Solera Holdings acquired DealerSocket around June 2021, according to the complaint, the company obtained personnel records confirming the worker's vision-based disability and the multi-screen accommodations his previous employer had approved.
For a while, things worked. The complaint alleges the worker successfully performed all essential functions of his role through 2024 with the help of ZoomText, a screen enhancement tool provided by the state of Maryland.
Then his vision got worse.
Around April 2024, the complaint alleges, the worker could no longer see his computer screen well enough to run software demonstrations for potential customers. He told his supervisor and asked for a transfer to a role that did not require live demos. The EEOC alleges the company found him qualified for an account executive position on its inside sales team - a job that would not involve demonstrations.
The company approved the transfer around July 8, 2024. What followed, according to the filing, was not an accommodation.
The complaint alleges Solera confined the worker to selling only Inventory Plus - described in the filing as the least popular product in the company's suite. His roughly five non-disabled colleagues on the inside sales team, the EEOC alleges, were free to sell everything: dealer management systems, CRM tools, website services, desking software, equity mining tools, and more.
Those colleagues also allegedly received a specific sales territory with an existing customer base and active leads. The worker, the complaint says, got none of that. He was expected to drum up business through cold calling alone.
The exclusion allegedly went further. According to the filing, the company left the worker out of regular inside sales team meetings, cut him from team training sessions - including an in-person conference held in Texas - and held him to the same sales targets as colleagues who had access to the full product suite, territories, leads, and training.
By the summer of 2024, the worker had moved to JAWS, a commercial screen reader that uses text-to-speech to read on-screen content aloud. The company's account executives used Salesforce as their sales and customer relationship management software. In August 2024, the complaint alleges, the worker asked the company to modify his Salesforce homepage and interface so it would work better with JAWS - specifically, by limiting unnecessary content and making screen navigation more efficient.
The company's response, according to the EEOC, was to pull him off the job entirely.
The complaint alleges that around October 4, 2024, while the worker was still performing his account executive duties, the company told him it was placing him on unpaid leave while it considered his Salesforce accommodation request. He was allowed back around October 11, 2024, the filing states - without any accommodations in place.
The company did modify his Salesforce screen around November 13, 2024, the complaint alleges. But the EEOC says the company failed to provide effective training or instruction on the new screen layout, the navigation commands, or the keyboard shortcuts for his modified system. The filing further alleges the company told an employee with Salesforce expertise to stop helping the worker, and told the worker to stop asking that employee for assistance.
Around August 2025, the complaint alleges, the company terminated the worker for "alleged failure to meet sales expectations."
The EEOC brings three claims under the Americans with Disabilities Act. First, that Solera failed to accommodate the worker's known limitations - in plain terms, that it did not work with him to find practical adjustments that would let him do his job. Second, that the company retaliated against him by forcing him onto unpaid leave after he asked for a reasonable accommodation. Third, that the company treated him worse than his non-disabled colleagues because of his disability - confining him to one product, denying him a territory and leads, excluding him from meetings and training, and ultimately firing him.
The EEOC is seeking a court order to stop the alleged practices, along with back pay, damages for emotional harm, punitive damages, and either reinstatement or pay in lieu of reinstatement. The Commission has requested a jury trial.
For HR teams, the pattern alleged here is a practical warning: transferring a worker with a disability into a new role and then starving that role of the resources every other employee receives is exactly the kind of conduct the EEOC will take to federal court.
The allegations in the complaint have not been tested in court, and no court has made any findings on the merits.
