NEW DELHI: A 17-year-old Delhi student has created an accessible job-matching platform aimed at improving employment opportunities for persons with disabilities. 

Viraj Gupta, a Grade 12 student at The Lawrence School, Sanawar, was driven to act after learning from his father that disability-reserved roles in his company had remained unfilled for months despite widespread unemployment.

His curiosity led him to investigate the disconnect between disabled job seekers and employers, eventually taking him to Samarthanam, India’s largest NGO for persons with disabilities. 

There, he met individuals like Rakesh, a visually impaired candidate who lost out on a multinational job opportunity due to a last-minute screen reader malfunction. 

Similar stories of inaccessible transport, limited digital literacy, and entrenched employer bias surfaced repeatedly during his research.

Viraj documented his insights in a paper titled “Unemployment Amongst the Disabled: A Global Perspective”, outlining how systemic barriers, information gaps, and misaligned skills continue to exclude disabled candidates from the workforce.

A discussion with Kartik Sawhney, the first visually impaired Indian student to attend Stanford, further informed his approach. 

Inspired by Sawhney’s belief in empathetic technology, Viraj went on to build Workabled, a platform designed to prioritise accessibility at every stage of the hiring process.

Workabled uses LLM-based APIs to power features such as automated résumé creation, semantic labels compatible with screen readers, and an AI calling agent to refresh outdated NGO databases. It also uniquely matches candidates’ accessibility needs with workplace accommodations offered by employers.