Cite as: 527 U. S. 555 (1999)
Opinion of the Court
an employer "will not be able to avoid the [ADA's] strictures by showing that its standards are necessary to prevent a direct safety threat," 143 F. 3d, at 1237. The Court of Appeals thus assumed that the regulatory provisions for the waiver program had to be treated as being on par with the basic visual acuity regulation, as if the general rule had been modified by some different safety standard made applicable by grant of a waiver. Cf. Conroy v. Aniskoff, 507 U. S. 511, 515 (1993) (noting the " 'cardinal rule that a statute is to be read as a whole' " (quoting King v. St. Vincent's Hospital, 502 U. S. 215, 221 (1991))). On this reading, an individualized determination under a different substantive safety rule was an element of the regulatory regime, which would easily fit with any requirement of 42 U. S. C. §§ 12113(a) and (b) to consider reasonable accommodation. An employer resting solely on the federal standard for its visual acuity qualification would be required to accept a waiver once obtained, and probably to provide an applicant some opportunity to obtain a waiver whenever that was reasonably possible. If this was sound analysis, the District Court's summary judgment for Albertson's was error.
But the reasoning underlying the Court of Appeals's decision was unsound, for we think it was error to read the regulations establishing the waiver program as modifying the content of the basic visual acuity standard in a way that dis-entitled an employer like Albertson's to insist on it. To be sure, this is not immediately apparent. If one starts with the statutory provisions authorizing regulations by the DOT as they stood at the time the DOT began the waiver program, one would reasonably presume that the general regulatory standard and the regulatory waiver standard ought to be accorded equal substantive significance, so that the content of any general regulation would as a matter of law be deemed modified by the terms of any waiver standard thus applied to it. Compare 49 U. S. C. App. § 2505(a)(3) (1988 ed.) ("Such regulation shall . . . ensure that . . . the physical
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