Anna Bradley Picks a Fight

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Her tale gets worse before it gets better. In 2000, while working for Florida Light & Power, Bradley contracted a bacterial infection, likely during a routine root canal. The infection settled around her heart, triggering a four-day episode of tachycardia. This third health strike really laid her low. Bedridden for months, unable to work, Bradley first depleted what little savings she had, then sold both the home she'd bought in Iowa and her second home in Stuart, Florida. "I went bust. I lost everything I'd ever worked for," she says. "At 35, moving back into my parents' home was the hardest thing I ever had to do, but I had no choice."

Now that she had touched bottom, she discovered that she had acquaintances, not friends. No one offered to take her in. So Bradley retreated, ailing and humiliated, to the confines of her former bedroom, a narrow, cell-like enclosure with a twin bed, a small desk, and a litter box for her cat--a most unusual business incubator indeed. Armed with a cell phone and a five-year-old HP (NYSE:HPQ) computer with a pokey 56k modem, she set about creating a business that would suit the life that now seemed hers, one of good days and bad days.

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?

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