"Reasonable accommodation" is a negotiation between you and the employer. There is nothing that defines what a "reasonable accommodation" is, up to and including remote work. The ADA gives potential examples, one of which is working at an alternative location.

https://www.dol.gov/agencies/odep/program-areas/employers/ac...

Your employer may find WFH unreasonable and deny it. Or they may find it reasonable and let you go for it.

But there are no "general rules" when it comes to ADA work accommodations.

An employer can legally deny WFH no matter how disabled the employee is even if the employee has already been doing the same job from home for years. To me, that means that legal protections are nonexistent in this regard and therefore practically meaningless.

I don’t think anything you said contradicts what I have been told, though maybe I didn’t explain it very well.

If an employer is required to allow “reasonable accommodations” but is never required to allow working from home, then logically it would seem to follow that working from home is not a reasonable accommodation … or so I had concluded, but technically that might be wrong in some way that’s not very interesting to people actually affected by these laws.

Any law that requires an employee to negotiate with their employer would seem to be a rather toothless law given the power imbalance involved. Maybe that’s the larger problem.

An employer can legally deny just about anything that they consider 'unreasonable', yes. If you injured your back and could no longer stand for hours at a time on a job that requires it and there is no alternative, absolutely you can be let go.

Picking out WFH as 'not protected' is largely meaningless. This is why it is called _reasonable_ accommodation, not _required_ accommodation.

As with any job, how you do your job, where you do your job, etc. can change based on the number of farts the CEO has passed today.

Yes, worker protections in the US are abysmal. You'll never find me arguing otherwise.