The Arc of Texas, an organization dedicated to inclusion, advocacy and disability rights, is hiring a new CEO. Their job announcement, as originally posted, made one thing clear: Disabled people need not apply.

Towards the bottom of the application, a strange list of criteria under the headline, “Physical and Mental Requirements,” included “Seeing, Hearing/Listening, Clear speech, Ability to move distances between offices and workspaces, Driving.” The next post, for another well-paid leadership position, added “manual dexterity, lifting up to 25 pounds, carrying up to 25 pounds” to the list, making it even more restrictive.

What’s a disability rights organization doing pre-emptively discriminating against disabled individuals in their most important hiring? And is this kind of language — which can be found in job postings from the tech sector, the non-profit world, and countless academic jobs — even legal?

Samuel Bagenstos, now an expert on disability law at the University of Michigan and a former Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the US Department of Justice, called The Arc posting “a pretty blatant violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.”

“I really thought it was a bad joke, not a serious job advertisement,” he wrote me in an email. “The ADA prohibits employers from adopting selection criteria that screen out classes of individuals with disabilities unless the criteria are job-related. There is no strong business reason why the CEO or the advocacy director should have to be able to see, hear, drive, lift or carry. These aren’t manual-labor jobs.”

When disabled people are excluded from applying for jobs, the disability community suffers and businesses cheat themselves out of potential great employees. Jay Ruderman, President of the Ruderman Family Foundation, which advocates for the full inclusion of people with disabilities into society, told me, “people may not know that people with disabilities are the largest minority in our country and the poorest segment of our population. It is fundamentally unjust that 70 percent of people with disabilities are unemployed and excluded from inclusion in the daily aspects of life most of us take from granted.”

Ruderman cited the benefits of hiring people with disabilities, noting that employers get, “a loyal, hard-working employee [and] their entire workforce is energized through their engagement in a socially just workplace.” Statistics from the Department of Labor confirm Ruderman’s assessment. Only 19.2 percent of people with disabilities participate in the labor force, as opposed to 68.1 percent without disabilities. The unemployment rate overall is 4.6 percent, but for people with disabilities, it’s 10.3 percent.

Disabled Americans are well aware of the problem. Lauren Appelbaum, Director of Communications at RespectAbility, a non-partisan organization focused on empowerment for the disabled, told me that when polling disabled voters in the 2014 election cycle, “58 percent of the disability community rank a candidates’ position on the economy, jobs and wages as the No. 1 issue when asked to rank their top 3 issues.” That pattern continues in the current electoral cycle.

Why is it so hard for disabled Americans to find work? Obviously, some people are prevented from doing some kinds work due to their disabilities. Others are heavily reliant on government benefits, which often limit the number of hours or level of income one can achieve without jeopardizing those benefits.