Before he built a tech platform used by thousands, Amandipp Singh had to fight to read his own textbooks.
Born with no control in his left eye, Singh underwent his first eye surgery at age eight and a second at ten. By then, the damage was permanent, and his right eye had begun to weaken as well. School became harder. Asking for help even more so.
What he couldn’t see clearly was that the barriers he faced would one day lead him to shape a system designed to remove them.
And not just for him, but for thousands of others.
That early experience became the foundation for Enabled Talent, an Ontario-based social enterprise. The company designed a digital employment platform that helps match people with disabilities to jobs more effectively.
The platform acts as a hiring and onboarding system (used by both job seekers and employers) that adapts to different access needs using AI. Singh’s goal is to make this kind of inclusive matching part of the underlying infrastructure of workforce development, not an add-on or exception.
Last month, Enabled Talent marked a new milestone by launching a research partnership with Algoma University. The collaboration is focused on a co-developed AI-powered accessibility tool called Eynable to help people with vision impairment for day-to-day work.
The Algoma University partnership is one step in a larger rollout. Enabled Talent is expanding nationally with an Alberta base later this year, and internationally through Enabled Africa, beginning in Ghana and Nigeria with support from the UNICEF Startup Lab.
Singh hopes to eventually open-source much of the toolset so that other companies, governments, and institutions can build on it.
The aim is to help people with disabilities, including those with vision impairments, more easily navigate websites, interpret images, and interact with digital systems. It’s part of a wider strategy to make inclusion a core feature of Canada’s talent infrastructure, rather than something treated as optional or external.
From charity to infrastructure
The challenge Singh is tackling isn’t a new one.
The employment gap for people with disabilities in Canada remains significant. As of 2024, the employment rate for working-age adults with disabilities is 46.4%, compared to 66.2% for those without disabilities. More than 850,000 people with disabilities who are ready to work remain excluded from the labour force. Globally, over one billion people live with a disability, and in many countries more than 70% are shut out of formal employment.
Singh says many people still assume disability inclusion should be handled by nonprofits or the government, but he disagrees. The real challenge, he argues, is whether our talent systems are built to include everyone.
“Everyone is doing the same thing, creating some similar platform,” he says. “But let’s say you are speaking French. I’m speaking Spanish. No matter how much we try, we won’t be able to communicate.”
Enabled Talent is betting that inclusive hiring can and should be treated as a systems-level innovation challenge. Singh spent over a decade working with grassroots organizations before launching the platform.
That experience shaped the company’s co-design approach, which involved working with user groups representing different types of disabilities to shape each accessibility pathway.
What makes his approach different is that it reframes disability inclusion not as a compliance issue or corporate social responsibility checkmark, but as a systems-level innovation problem.
Instead of simply matching job seekers to postings, Enabled Talent’s platform adapts to each user’s needs from the moment they sign up. It guides employers by recommending pre-matched candidates aligned with job requirements, accessibility needs, and compatibility, while providing onboarding, performance review, and ongoing support tools.
Enabled Talent is free for job seekers. It’s employer-supported, offering hiring and inclusion tools tailored for organizations.
For job seekers, it offers voice-guided navigation for people with visual impairments, chat-based guidance for neurodivergent users, and sign language interfaces for Deaf users.
On the employer side, it streamlines hiring by recommending pre-matched candidates based on job requirements, accessibility needs, and compatibility, without requiring hiring teams to navigate unfamiliar accommodations or guess who might be a good fit.
“We’re not building a patch,” says Singh. “We’re building infrastructure.”
The mindset shift is the innovation
What Enabled Talent is doing isn’t only relevant to HR teams. It offers a useful model for anyone building services in a more complex, fragmented, and expectation-heavy world.
The innovation here is the design approach. Enabled Talent’s product was co-created with user groups across different disability communities over a six-month period. It reflects the principle that people closest to a problem should be involved in designing the solution.
Singh’s team includes developers and engineers with disabilities who help ensure the platform works for the people it’s meant to serve.
For public sector leaders, employers, and educators, the lesson is that inclusive systems don’t emerge from blanket policies. They come from infrastructure that understands difference at the outset and adapts to it.
It’s a lesson that’s gaining ground.
Canada’s “Nothing Without Us” strategy and the barrier-free Canada goal for 2040 both reflect a growing understanding that disability inclusion is not a niche issue. It’s a national productivity issue, a talent strategy, and a test of innovation readiness.
Why this matters now
In a labour market where companies are struggling to fill roles and build future-ready teams, overlooking a third of the population isn’t only a moral failing. It’s a missed opportunity, and a glaring one.
“Talent is already here, but by not having accessible pathways companies are missing out,” says Singh. “There are many Stephen [Hawkings] around and there are many Helen Kellers around. They just need one chance.”
He adds that 90 to 95% of applications don’t even make it past Human Resources Information System software, and while leaders are missing out on quality talent, the oversight also impacts the economy.
Excluding people with disabilities can cost economies up to 7% of GDP, and companies committed to inclusion report 28% higher revenue, double the net income, and 30% greater profit margins.
But Singh says the barriers aren’t only structural. They’re psychological. Most people with non-visible disabilities fear disclosure will cost them a job. Most employers still see inclusion as exceptional effort, rather than operational design.
Enabled Talent is betting that reframing inclusion as innovation, and not obligation, is what gets us closer to change.
As a child, Singh may have had to fight to access the most basic tools to learn. But now, he’s building the tools he once needed so others don’t have to fight just to be seen.
“Even if it is 0.01% improvement or change every day,” says Singh. “That will one day turn into a ripple effect.”
Final shots
- Building for difference from the outset is faster than adapting later. Inclusive design isn’t a detour. It’s the shortest path to scale.
- Tools built for the margins often raise the standard for everyone. Accessibility tools built for users with disabilities can help shape the future of EdTech, HR tech, and user experience design.
- Innovation leaders should ask themselves, “Are we designing systems for how people actually work and live, or for how we assume they do?”
