Three years ago, Roswell James was suffering from shingles, which so weakened his eyes he could only use them for brief periods each day. In that precious time, he went online to research his condition, but found there was no one site that contained all the information he needed. So, when he recovered, he set about creating his own site -- Enablers.ca, the disability site -- a one-stop shop for information on living with a wide range of diseases and disabilities.

For the last two years, James, a book-keeper, has been funding the site himself and working on it weekends and evenings. He has been the recipient of a great deal of goodwill and donated time, and a lot of work has been completed on ten common diseases, but there are around 490 still to research and input. Now, he is looking for $500,000 in funding to speed up the site’s rate of development to the point where advertisers will be tempted aboard.  

“I need money to get this thing to fly,” said James from his narrow work space on Quinpool Road in Halifax, which has been donated by AFS Agency, one of James’s book-keeping clients. “A lot of people have helped me get this off the ground, but we need to get it to work on a larger scale. I haven’t tried for advertising yet as I felt we needed to develop the site to a certain point before approaching advertisers, but we’re there now.”

James believes advertisers will part with their cash because the site provides direct links to their sites. Enablers.ca also already contains a lot of information on various conditions, FAQs, government and not-for-profit organizations, news about goods and services as well as blogs and personal stories. The site looks at disabilities from many points of view – for instance, learning to live with a disability is considered from both an employee and employer’s perspective.

James, who has lived with epilepsy and associated health conditions all his life, said the focus is on understanding and surmounting disability.      

“If you understand your disability, you can overcome it,” he said.

Currently, James’s only assistant is Kashif Kashif, a computer science student at Saint Mary’s University. Kashif is building the site’s schizophrenia segment and helping with uploading youtube videos. The student’s paycheck is being partially funded by the provincial government; the only financial backing the project has received so far.

“We’ve listed almost 500 common disabilities we need to build, from autism to schizophrenia. It’s a huge job. I need about five people to get it done and I want them all to be people with disabilities because they’ll have personal understanding of the issues,” James said. “In a year’s time, I want this to be a national entity that doctors tell their patients about.”

Enablers.ca is not James’s first entrepreneurial activity for disabled people. In the 1970s, he created talking books for the blind. In the 1990s, he was an early pioneer of internet selling with an online bookstore. This went well, he said, until he was put out of business by the growth of Amazon.

He said that Enablers is allowing him to bring his past experiences and passion together. “Working with people with disabilities means a lot to me,” he said. “I would like to give others the tools to overcome their disabilities.”