Bradley had joined the ranks of America's disabled, a much misunderstood portion of the nation's population. One unintended consequence of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990, which expanded equal access regulations to state and local governments and private employers, has been the skewing of the public's perception of disability. For many people, disability equals wheelchair. "Every time we park our car we see that handicapped parking place, and every time we go to the bathroom we see that symbol," says Daniel Goldstein, a lawyer with the firm Brown, Goldstein & Levy and counsel for the National Federation of the Blind. The blind, continues Goldstein, are part of "a fairly invisible minority." Indeed, 9.3 million Americans are blind, hearing impaired, or both, according to the most recent U.S. Census data. Overall, the 2000 Census identified 49.7 million respondents with some kind of lasting physical, mental, or emotional disability. That's nearly one in five Americans.
To see Bradley, now 41, behind the wheel of her now 10-year-old Explorer you'd never know the pain she endures, or that the Small Business Administration has certified her company as an 8(a), or disadvantaged, firm. But watch her closely, and you'll notice that her spunk outstrips her gait, which sometimes borders on unsteady.
A good chunk of the counter in the bathroom off her bedroom is taken up by a phalanx of pharmaceutical vials--painkillers, heart medicine, and more. Bradley is also prediabetic and suffers from asthmalike symptoms. She goes in for periodic injections in the back of her head to manage her chronic migraines. Her hormone replacement therapy takes the form of creams and pills. Frankly, she's the Physicians' Desk Reference incarnate. "Most mornings when I get up I feel like I scrimmaged with the Green Bay Packers the day before," she says. Her mobility generally improves as the day progresses, but some days she barely makes it to the living room couch, and she's gone a week or more without leaving the house. She'll answer the phone if it rings, but may not turn on her computer. Keeping her company are her lap-size Italian greyhound, Paco, and her two cats, Fred and Mr. Big, who's gone blind. "That's my family," she says. "I take incredible care of my animals. When I travel, Paco goes to a pet resort where he has his own room with a TV set and they baby him something terrible."
All of which explains why Bradley's bedroom-hatched business plan for Criterion 508 Solutions called for a virtual business, one operated via the phone and Internet, employing just-in-time contract workers operating out of their homes, just like herself, many of them also afflicted with a serious disability. Attending an Entrepreneurs With Disabilities workshop held by the Iowa Department of Vocational Rehabilitation Services (mostly, Bradley admits, so she could qualify for a $20,000 grant to help launch her business) opened her eyes to the varying challenges and abilities of those with disabilities other than her own. Who better to help her snag a share of the nascent industry conducting audits and fixing software and websites to make information technology accessible to disabled users than tech analysts who are blind or suffer from cystic fibrosis or MS--the very users who increasingly rely on technology to keep them integrated with the rest of the world?
How can the blind surf the Internet, meaningfully visit various websites, and transact business online? The answer is, not easily, and often not at all, if the supporting source code and architecture of a website have not been specifically built or reconfigured to be accessible to the special software employed by the visually impaired. That's one of the key aims of the Section 508 provisions--to make government PDF documents and websites accessible to the now widely available screen access software, the so-called screen readers, which say aloud in synthesized speech what the sighted see on their computer screens. Section 508 also comes to the aid of the colorblind (a population that includes as many as one in 10 males, who may miss information and options coded only by color or against similarly hued backgrounds), those with failing vision, the deaf (for whom a webcast lacking synchronized subtitles will be meaningless), and those with severe physical disabilities who access their computers by blowing or tapping the keyboard with a mouth-held stick.
About half of the 30 people who work for Bradley have some serious disability. She supplements a core group of seven contract employees with another two dozen workers brought in on an as-needed basis. Some are blind. One has cerebral palsy. Another has returned to the work force after years of anxiety and depression caused by a serious case of undiagnosed sleep apnea. Other workers are not disabled but have young children and cherish their Criterion job because it allows them to work from home, typically at night after the kids have gone to bed. "I have disabled employees whose best previous job was working in a fast food restaurant who are now making $35 an hour, doing what they are capable of doing," Bradley says. Several of her employees have advanced degrees and earn as much as $75 an hour.
Bradley deflects an attempt to pin a crusader's button on the Criterion logo shirts she favors. "I'm a pragmatic person," she says. "This is business, pure and simple." But she's clearly happy with the how and the why and the who behind her company. "The vision isn't just to provide Section 508 services. The vision of Criterion is also to create golden-collar job opportunities for qualified disabled people to provide Section 508 services, because, guess what, they've got a skill set, which is their disability, which you can't go to college to learn."
Though the majority of her employees are Iowans, Bradley also mails checks to workers in Missouri and North Carolina, and Canada. All, except a childhood friend who lives a few blocks away, have been hired over the telephone (typically, after a qualifying phone interview with her chief technology officer, Patrick Shields, who lives in Toronto). "What I focus on," says Bradley, "is the inflection in their voice, how well they communicate, what excites them about Criterion."
