The President of Pakistan has approved the conferment of the Tamgha-e-Imtiaz, one of the country’s prestigious civil awards, upon Ali Shabbar, Founder and CEO of DeafTawk, on the occasion of Pakistan’s Independence Day. The recognition places Shabbar among a group of individuals honoured this year for distinguished contributions across fields including science, engineering, education, medicine, social welfare, and public service, with his award specifically tied to his work in building assistive technology for people with disabilities.
Shabbar co-founded DeafTawk in 2019 alongside Wamiq Hassan and Abdul Qadeer, building a mobile application that connects deaf users with certified sign language interpreters in real time through video calls, available around the clock across both iOS and Android platforms. The idea for the company drew directly from the founders’ own experiences, with Shabbar and Qadeer both visually impaired and Hassan born deaf, having faced significant barriers accessing education and services in Pakistan before eventually training as a software engineer in the United States.
DeafTawk began with just two interpreters and no customers in 2018, and has since grown to work with more than one thousand one hundred professional interpreters, serving tens of thousands of users across multiple countries including Pakistan, Singapore, Sri Lanka, and Denmark, where the company is now headquartered. The platform offers interpretation services across six different sign language styles, including Pakistani, American, British, Chinese, Singaporean, and Malay, allowing deaf users to communicate with doctors, teachers, employers, and family members through the app.
The company has continued to expand its recognition on international platforms in the years since its founding, having been declared one of the best startups across the Asia Pacific region by the United Nations Development Programme, and later becoming the first Pakistani organisation to provide live sign language interpretation services at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, one of the world’s largest mobile technology events. DeafTawk has also worked with global accelerator programmes including MassChallenge and Parallel18, raising funding to support its continued expansion across new markets.
Shabbar’s recognition through the Tamgha-e-Imtiaz reflects a broader pattern in this year’s Independence Day civil awards, where the Tamgha-i-Imtiaz stood as the largest single award category among the group of individuals honoured for contributions spanning multiple sectors of Pakistani society. For Shabbar and his co-founders, the award adds to a body of work that has continued to position DeafTawk as a company built around inclusion, with its founders describing the platform’s mission as one centred on eradicating communication barriers faced by people with disabilities both within Pakistan and in the wider markets the company now operates in.
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