Think about the last video meeting you ran. Someone’s camera was probably off, and a small part of you may have wondered whether they were really paying attention.
That instinct feels harmless. It is how most of us have been conditioned to read engagement on a screen. Camera on means present and committed. Camera off means distracted, disengaged, or hiding something.
An employment tribunal has just ruled that acting on that instinct cost an employer a discrimination finding.
In Tait v Holiday Extras Ltd, decided in June 2026, the tribunal found that expecting a neurodivergent employee to join meetings with her camera on put her at a substantial disadvantage, and that letting her keep it off was a reasonable adjustment her employer failed to make. She had told them directly that being on camera was overwhelming her. They asked her to try anyway. It then took around fourteen months for the adjustment to be formally agreed, by which point she had been off sick for almost a year. She has not been back to work since.
For a rule that has never been written into any policy document, the camera-on expectation turns out to carry real legal weight. Here is why this case matters, and what it means for anyone who manages people through a screen.
The meeting before the meeting
To understand what happened, it helps to understand what a video call demands from many neurodivergent people before any actual work begins.
Someone with ADHD or autism joining a video meeting is often running several jobs at once. They are following the conversation. They are scanning a grid of faces for expressions and reactions, which is harder on screen than in a room. They are watching their own image and adjusting how they come across. They are working to appear calm, engaged and neurotypical, an effort known as masking, which consumes real cognitive energy even when it looks effortless from the outside.
All of that happens underneath the meeting itself. The employee who seems quiet on your Tuesday call may be working harder than anyone else in it.
This is what Laura Tait was describing when she asked to join a training session with her camera off. She said she was feeling too anxious to be on screen. She was told to start with the camera on and see how it went. She could not do it, and she logged off.
The tribunal treated that moment as the turning point. From that day, her employer knew that being on camera caused her genuine difficulty. The fix was free, instant and affected nobody else. It still took more than a year to happen.
Why an unwritten rule counts in law
The most useful lesson in this case for managers is that the law does not care whether a rule is official.
The judgment does not turn on any written policy requiring cameras on. It did not need to. Holiday Extras accepted that the requirement to join meetings and training with cameras on was a “provision, criterion or practice”, and under the Equality Act an informal practice can count just as much as a formal policy. If it places a disabled employee at a substantial disadvantage, the employer has a duty to consider adjusting it. Our guide to reasonable adjustments and your legal responsibilities sets out how that duty works.
Every team has rules like this. Cameras on. Replies within the hour. Speaking up in meetings as proof of contribution. None of them are written down, all of them shape how people are judged, and any of them could be doing quiet damage to someone whose brain works differently.
The second lesson is about timing. The duty to act did not start when Ms Tait submitted a formal request or produced medical evidence. It started the moment she said, plainly and in the moment, that she could not cope. The tribunal found the camera-off adjustment should have been in place from the day her request was first turned down, more than a year before it was agreed. A manager who waits for paperwork before acting on what an employee has already said may feel careful, but a tribunal is likely to see it as late.
The people you will never hear from
There is a bigger point here than one ruling, and it is the reason this case deserves attention beyond HR circles.
Ms Tait asked. Most people in her position never do. They turn the camera on, get through the call, and pay for it privately in exhaustion, anxiety and slowly eroding capacity. CIPD research found that 31% of neurodivergent employees had not told their line manager or HR about their neurodivergence. Many worry about being seen as less capable. We look at why in 1 in 5 of your employees is neurodivergent, but you might not know it yet.
Which means the absence of requests tells you nothing. A manager who has never been asked about camera-off does not have a team with no need for it. They more likely have a team where nobody feels safe asking.
That is the real cost of unexamined defaults. They wear down the people who cannot keep them up, one draining meeting at a time, and the organisation never sees it happening. What it sees instead is sickness absence, resignations and performance dips nobody can explain.
What good looks like
None of this requires banning cameras or rewriting your meeting culture from scratch. It requires making the flexible option normal instead of exceptional.
Say it out loud at the start of meetings. Put a line in recurring invites that cameras are welcome but optional. When someone joins with their camera off, treat it as unremarkable, because it is. The point is to remove the need to ask, since asking is the step most people will not take. A shared working styles guide helps here, because it lets people say how they work best without having to disclose anything.
Beyond cameras, it is worth asking what your other unwritten rules are, and who they quietly shut out. That is hard to answer from inside your own assumptions, which is why manager training on neurodiversity matters. Tribunals look at what a reasonable employer should have known and done, and cases like this one make it harder to claim nobody could have seen it coming.
The employers who get ahead of this will do it because removing pointless friction is how you keep good people, rather than because a tribunal frightened them. Most of what neurodivergent employees ask for is simply the removal of barriers that never needed to be there in the first place.
How Enna can help
Most managers never meant to make anyone switch their camera on against their will. They just never thought about it. Our neurodiversity awareness training for managers looks at exactly these unwritten rules, and our neuroinclusive collaboration workshop helps whole teams rethink how they run meetings, hybrid and in person.
When an employee raises a need, a workplace needs assessment gives you clear, practical recommendations quickly, so nothing sits unresolved for fourteen months. For HR teams who want the legal side covered properly, there is our reasonable adjustments workshop.
Not sure where to start? Book a short call and we will help you work it out.
