Think about the last video meeting you ran. Someone’s camera was probably off. Did you notice? Did a small part of you wonder if 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 fourteen months for the adjustment to be formally agreed, by which point she had been signed off sick and never returned.
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 manage 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.
Holiday Extras had no written policy requiring cameras on. It did not need one. The expectation existed in practice, and under the Equality Act an informal practice is treated the same way as a formal policy. If it places a disabled employee at a substantial disadvantage, the employer must consider adjusting it.
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. Managers who wait for paperwork before responding to what an employee has already told them are not being careful. In the eyes of a tribunal, they are already 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. Research on workplace disclosure consistently shows that a large proportion of neurodivergent employees tell nobody at work about their diagnosis, because they fear being seen as less capable or less committed.
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 filter out the people who cannot sustain them, silently, one draining meeting at a time, and the organisation never sees it happening. It just sees rising sickness absence, quiet resignations and performance dips it cannot 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 precisely the step most people will not take.
Beyond cameras, it is worth asking what your other unwritten rules are, and who might be quietly struggling with them. That question is difficult to answer from inside your own assumptions, which is exactly why manager training on neurodiversity has shifted from a nice-to-have into something tribunals increasingly expect employers to have invested in. The standard for what a reasonable employer should know is rising, and this judgment just raised it again.
The employers who get ahead of this will not do it because a tribunal frightened them. They will do it because removing pointless friction is how you keep good people. The camera ruling is a small example of a large truth: most of what neurodivergent employees need is not special treatment. It is the removal of barriers that never needed to be there.
How Enna can help
At Enna, we train managers and HR teams to recognise the barriers neurodivergent employees actually face, respond well when someone is struggling, and make reasonable adjustments that are practical, proportionate and legally sound.
Get in touch or explore our training to see how we can support your organisation.
