Manoj Venkatesun
← Our Ability

Our Ability · 2026

Self-Disclosure Disability Q&A App

Three tabs, one job: help candidates search for work and figure out how to talk about a disability along the way. Built solo, backend to frontend.

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Role
Product Engineer
Timeline
Jan 2026 – Jul 2026
Team
Solo project
Year
2026

What it does

A companion tool for Our Ability's platform. Three tabs and a text-message campaign.

Find Jobs. You type what you're after, "data engineer role," and Claude takes that and matches it against Our Ability's own listings. Three to four thousand roles from organisations they've partnered with: CVS Health, Pfizer, Toyota, KeyBank, Albany Med. Not scraped from job boards. The listings are real and current because the partnerships behind them already exist.

The Find Jobs tab before a search
A plain-language query, which Claude matches against Our Ability's own listings

Self-Disclosure. Ask a question about disclosing a disability during a job search, get an answer with the sources it drew from.

Accommodations. The same thing, for working out what to ask an employer for once you're in the role.

SMS campaign. A four-week run over Twilio, one message a week to 138 candidates, asking for feedback on the service. It sends on a Tuesday cron and switches itself off after week four.

The problem

Disclosure gets talked about like a confession. Something you admit, then hope it doesn't count against you. That framing is backwards, and it's part of why people find it so hard.

What actually helps is being specific. A candidate who can say exactly what they need, a screen reader, a modified schedule, a change to a workspace, gives the employer something they can act on. Vague disclosure gets vague accommodation, or none at all. Precise disclosure gets you the thing you need to do the job.

The hard part is that most people don't know what to ask for, or when, or how much to say. That isn't a confidence problem you can fix with encouragement. It's an information problem.

The Self-Disclosure tab. Questions get asked in plain language rather than picked from a list.
An accommodations answer, with its sources listed underneath so a candidate can check the reasoning instead of taking it on trust.

What I built

Backend and frontend, solo.

The whole thing deploys as a single Python serverless function on Vercel. That function serves one HTML file and handles every API route behind it: the job matching, the two Q&A tabs, the video generation, the Twilio endpoints and the cron.

That shape is why the frontend is vanilla JavaScript with no build step. There's no bundler and no framework config in the project, because adding one would have meant a build pipeline and a second deployment target for what is a single page. The deployment decided the frontend, not the other way round.

The video feature that shipped anyway

Generating a video from an answer
The result. At six seconds the model can't render text legibly, and the headings come out garbled.

Where it stands now

The tool works and it's published, but it sits apart from the candidate dashboard Our Ability already runs. The plan was to fold it in so candidates use one application instead of two, finding jobs and working out what to disclose in the same place. That integration hadn't happened by the time my contract ended.