Within the framework established under the Rehabilitation Act, courts treated the determination of disability as a threshold issue, but focused primarily on whether unlawful discrimination had occurred.

[10] The second decision in Toyota Motor Manufacturing, Kentucky, Inc. v. Williams narrowed the definition of "disability" to just those impairments that impact tasks of daily living.

These included individuals with impairments such as amputation, intellectual disabilities, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, HIV/AIDS, diabetes, muscular dystrophy, and cancer.

[13] In 2004, the National Council on Disability, an independent Federal agency charged with making recommendations to the President and Congress, issued a report called "Righting the ADA.

The most important misinterpretation the report identified was the narrowing of the ADA's definition of "disability" to exclude many individuals that Congress intended to protect from discrimination.

On September 29, 2006, the last working day of the 109th Congress, Representative Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI), then Chair of the United States House Committee on the Judiciary, and then-Minority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) introduced H.R.

Despite the number of House co-sponsors of the legislation, the business community and the Justice Department urged Members of Congress to oppose the ADA Restoration Act.

Former Representative Tony Coelho and Nancy Zirkin from the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights also provided political counsel throughout the process.

Tim Bartl (HR Policy) and Camille Olson (Seyfarth Shaw) also provided political and legal counsel to the business negotiators.

For a full list of the many individuals and groups who worked on the ADAAA, from the disability, civil rights, and business communities, see the Statement by Majority Leader Hoyer on September 17, 2008.

Third, the law prohibits consideration of mitigating measures such as medication, assistive technology, accommodations, or modifications when determining whether an impairment substantially limits a major life activity.

The related text of the ADAAA explicitly rejects the Supreme Court's holdings in Sutton and its companion cases that mitigating measures must be considered in determining whether an impairment constitutes a disability under the law.

[30] The non-exhaustive list of major life activities in § 4(4)(a) of the amended ADA includes caring for oneself, performing manual tasks, seeing, hearing, eating, sleeping, walking, standing, lifting, bending, speaking, breathing, learning, reading, concentrating, thinking, communicating and working.

Under the ADAAA, therefore, an individual can establish coverage under the law by showing that he or she has been subjected to an action prohibited under the Act because of an actual or perceived physical or mental impairment that is not transitory and minor.

[29] The law also explicitly states that although individuals who fall solely under the "regarded as" prong of the definition of disability are protected from discrimination, entities covered by the ADA are not required to provide accommodations, or to modify policies and procedures, for such persons.