AI hiring tools screen out disabled applicants and no one audits them

83% of employers and 99% of Fortune 500 companies use automated screening tools to filter job applicants. These tools — resume parsers, video interview analyzers, personality assessments, and algorithmic ranking systems — were not designed with disability in mind and systematically disadvantage disabled applicants. HireVue's speech recognition cannot accurately process Deaf applicants' responses, resulting in lower scores. Personality assessments penalize autistic applicants for atypical communication patterns. A 2024 University of Washington study found that resume screeners ranked resumes lower when they included disability-related awards or memberships. And because these tools operate as black boxes, rejected applicants never know that their disability caused the rejection. This matters because automated screening has become the gateway to employment at virtually every large company. A qualified wheelchair user, a Deaf software engineer, or an autistic data analyst may never reach a human interviewer because an algorithm filtered them out at step one. The scale is enormous: if 99% of Fortune 500 companies use these tools and each processes thousands of applications per year, millions of hiring decisions are being made by systems that have never been tested for disability bias. Unlike race and gender bias in AI — which has received significant attention — disability bias in hiring algorithms remains under-researched and under-litigated. The structural reason this persists is a gap between law and enforcement. The ADA prohibits employment screening that disproportionately excludes qualified disabled applicants, and the EEOC issued guidance in 2022 explicitly applying the ADA to AI hiring tools. But enforcement requires individual applicants to file complaints — and applicants who were silently filtered out by an algorithm do not know they were discriminated against. Only New York City currently requires annual bias audits of automated hiring tools, and even that law has been criticized as toothless. The vendors who sell these tools (Workday, HireVue, AON) have no legal obligation to test for disability bias before deploying their products, and their customers (employers) assume the tools are legally compliant without verification.