Disability is no barrier to starting your own company

Date: June 20th 2025

News provided by: The Sunday Times

The new legislation is in part what prompted the technology entrepreneur Kyran O'Mahoney who is legally blind to set up Nexus inclusion.

The company secured €2 million in funding to develop artificial intelligence powered software to make the internet more accessible for people of all abilities.

The Nexus AI tool, which is about to launch, can summaries all key information online at a reading level appropriate to the user and in the format with which they are comfortable.

It automatically add captions or transcripts and ensures that digital products work with assistive technologies.

The digital accessibility market is estimated to be worth $700 millions globally and is predicted to grow.

According to World health Organisation there are 1.3 billion people with a disability. One in four need assistance to access the online content, yet less that four per cent of the top million websites globally are accessible to people with disabilities.

"If you look at the banking sector it is still incredibly inaccessible, yet we have an inherent right to financial independence ... Some elderly, vision-impaired or people with learning difficulties can't read their own bank statements. Nexus Inclusion's solution will help with this Issue, O'Mahoney says." His company already employs seven staff and he plans to have 30 by the end of next year.

It is a far cry from his school days. "I remember being told, "Maybe you shouldn't do honours because you're visually impaired, and, "Maybe you should go to the remedial class." It happened to me over and over again," O'Mahoney says. It was only when, by dint of huge effort "my eyes nearly fell out of my head from the effort of reading". He secured a place on a computer science course at third level that everything changed, including his vision of himself. "At the time I didn't even know how to turn on a computer, I had to ask someone else.

But once I realised I could get a big screen and change the size of the font, I started to consume information about technology. It was like my world opened up," O'Mahoney says.

This article is written by:

Sandra O'Connell