"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…"
Like all the people who work for Bradley, Walker and McCall serve as contract employees, receiving their auditing assignments after Bradley rustles up the business. "I don't have any overhead if we don't have any projects, which is the best way for a small business to survive," Bradley says. She does some rainmaking at conferences, but most jobs come via Internet-spawned inquiries or by referrals. Clients have ranged from FEMA, the IRS, and the National Institutes of Health to a handful of state universities to the states of Nebraska, Louisiana, Florida, and Iowa. Then there's a range of private sector clients, including Citibank (NYSE:C), Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HPQ), and a number of health insurance plans.
In effect, Bradley has created an iceberg, a company with very little visible but all kinds of support hidden from view, notably a comprehensive suite of e-learning courses she created herself. Bradley trained her initial employees in a series of extended phone calls. Now new hires prepare for their first assignments by logging on to Criterion's proprietary training programs. Training also includes a virtual field trip to a website called EnableMart.com, which specializes in assistive technology and devices. "Look at all you're trying to accommodate," she instructs her employees, "not only the blind, but people like Christopher Reeve." Before soloing on a project, everybody first works a job or two with an experienced Criterion auditor. When Bradley needs to put several heads together, she and her employees convene online, at www.gotomeeting.com.
Criterion's jobs run from $12,000 to well over $100,000. A job begins with an audit, after which Criterion 508's techs train the client's techs to fix the client's website and keep it in compliance. Last year, partly on the strength of companies seeking her out because of spreading knowledge of the issues behind a class-action lawsuit filed against the retailer Target (NYSE:TGT) (see "Welcome! No, Not You," previous page), Criterion doubled its client base and had its first million-dollar year. In keeping with the virtual nature of her business, Bradley has met only about 5 percent of those she consults with. "Most people," she says, "picture Criterion in some four-story office complex with a receptionist." Not without a bit of a helping hand from her. Bradley indulges in the standard home business ruse of adding a bogus suite number to her address, which happens to be a charming one-story house on a cul-de-sac in a new development in Johnston, Iowa. Custom-built by her brother, the home is accessible to the handicapped.
Until last summer, when Bradley hosted a company picnic at her house, only two of her workers had visited the office of their employer. One of the two is a childhood friend named Gabriel Ruggieri, who lives a few blocks away. "Anna always had dreams bigger than the rest of us," he says. "When I was worried about money for a date on Friday night, she was planning a career. Back then, she had dreams of owning a deep-sea charter business. She had her boat picked out, she knew where she was going to keep it, what it would cost, how much she had to charge to make a living at it."
Two decades later, Bradley is piloting a very different vessel, a small, pioneering business in a burgeoning industry. Early this year, she expects, she'll need to ramp up hiring. She anticipates easily doubling or tripling the size of Criterion, should two companies that have slotted her for 508 compliance work be among the primes awarded two long-term government contracts, one for $10 billion, the other for $20 billion.
Such an upturn in business, she says, might require a dozen new hires, many full-time, auguring an eventual change in her business model. "Once corporate America gets onboard [the technology accessibility bandwagon], then we would need the resources to go after group health plans and other opportunities," she says. "We could conceivably be in that four-story office."
Were that to happen, Bradley imagines she might stop in "every other day or so for an hour to check with people" and continue to run Criterion remotely. She's at peace, challenged, and as comfortable as possible, working from her home office in a hinterland cul-de-sac. For her it is no dead end.
