Can you explain in more detail? As a person ignorant of these types of issues, I'm having a hard time understanding the connection between the lack of accessibility in an app to the firing of a blind employee.

Here's what happened as I remember it. The blind employee, Darrell, was providing technical support for a client company on behalf of his employer. At some point after he had taken on this role, the client added a requirement that anyone who worked with them had to use the Seibel CRM system in "high interactivity" mode. If I recall correctly from talking to Darrell, the high interactivity version of Seibel at this time (2006) used the Microsoft JVM. That, combined with the fact that the app implemented some custom controls with no regard for accessibility, made it completely unusable to him. So his employer laid him off. Luckily for him, they rehired him shortly after that, but only because they found a whole new role for him. One can question whether the real problem was the app developer, the client, or the employer. But the inaccessibility of the app was a critical factor.