Open-plan is actually sold to employers for its discriminatory "benefit". Mostly it's about age, not disability. People like you and me aren't even on their map. We may be a highly productive (in the long term, though short-term volatility is embarrassing) ~4% of the population but "they" don't care either way about us. They do want to keep "the olds" out, though.
Once people have kids, they struggle with open-plan offices. That's because the biologically rooted need to protect someone makes it impossible for you to keep the "you can trust anyone" attitude of college kids and programmers in halfway-house environments.
Open-plan forces you to trust randoms with visibility into how you are working, and that's something that's intolerable for anyone who's ever had a disability, anyone with a less-than-privileged upbringing, and anyone who's ever had a child (among other sets of people).
A lot of that stuff is known to have a discriminatory effect, but kept in place regardless. Also: open-plan offices.
The fact is that you can't get a sense of a creative worker's capability with a two-week audit cycle. You get noise that stresses people out.
Employers know that people have 2-3 good hours per day (that's neurotypical people). The 9-to-5 workday is just to maximize the likelihood of getting that 2-3 hours. If people could work a 3-hour day, the theory is that the ones who aren't on an inside track for advancement would put their good hours into other projects and give the company their crap hours. I don't think that that's fair or accurate, but it is the thinking.
Then there's the general problem of a white-collar world so bereft of vision that, in most organizations, we have to inflict stupid stresses on people then measure them based on their decline curves... when any robust, sane, humane system would get nowhere near the right side of said curve.
Many of the "mysterious" deaths that hit people under 50 in this field are, in fact, suicides.
Programmers don't seem to have a higher rate than anyone else, although there is a lot of burnout due to aggressive cultures. Founders have a very high suicide rate, and the worst thing about it is that it tends to be the few decent founders (not the douchebags in the tech press) who pop off.
The problem is that VCs all talk to each other and decide who to fund, so if you fall out with that crowd, you don't get another startup and your career is ruined. Consequently, a lot of founders get driven to take obscene risks with their companies (that they wouldn't take if they hadn't given up control) and get hit on the downside (lots of work, no payoff).
It's disgusting and inconsistent that Y Combinator is claiming to be taking a stand against this when it sends people like Buchheit out to attack one of our most talented people, just because Paul Graham doesn't like what he says occasionally.