Anna Bradley Picks a Fight

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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."

"I really like working for Anna," says Karen McCall, who "met" Bradley at a Web seminar in 2005. "Number one, our business ethics are similar, which is important for any long-term relationship, and I like the fact that she's drawing on expertise rather than having a fixed staff in one place. And the instructions she gives are clear and concise, both on the phone or via e-mail."

McCall, who has been legally blind since the age of 14, lives near Toronto. She worked for years in offices, at the Canadian National Institute for the Blind and three Canadian colleges and universities, until she tired of daily commuting. An expert in workplace accommodations for the blind, she's written a book on creating accessible PDF files. She currently squeezes in 10 to 20 hours a week for Criterion among projects of her own home-based businesses.

Brian Walker, a Des Moines resident and a full-time technology analyst for the Iowa Department for the Blind, also moonlights for Bradley, taking on audits and serving as a go-to person for new Criterion hires for insight on how someone using a screen reader will approach certain challenges in webpage navigation. Walker, who has been legally blind for half his 40 years, was one of the first blind tech people hired by the maker of JAWS for Windows, one of the most popular screen access programs. An expert JAWS user, he surfs the Internet with his speech reader turned up so fast the rush of words is unintelligible to an inexperienced listener. Walker knows how to move across a webpage looking for helpful headings. How to employ keywords to focus his searches. How to (sometimes) discern a Web designer's intent even when it's not clear from the words vocalized by his screen reader. But even Walker is left frustrated, like a rat in a maze, by inaccessible websites that subvert his screen reader's attempt to interpret their pages. What sighted customers take for granted--products for sale and prices and purchasing instructions--often assaults Walker like an acid trip of onrushing underlying HTML code: "Slash slash apostrophe comma graphic backslash underline apostrophe comma…"

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