Ordering from a Restaurant without a Menu

Imagine yourself going to your favorite restaurant. You like the ambience and you immediately find a comfortable spot for your own. Everything is going well until you receive the menu but you can’t read it. Think about it. What would you do? Would you ask the waiter about the available meals? Would you get frustrated and just look for another restaurant?

This is actually a common scenario for blind people. Oftentimes, they would go to a restaurant and they do not get a menu they can read.

How Some Restaurants Help Blind People

To solve this problem, some restaurants offer Braille menus. These menus contain the names of the meals in Braille, so that blind people can read them and decide which one to order. In the same book, there is usually a large print version of their menu. These menus have text that are much larger than the usual and are made for low vision individuals.

Although these options are available, blind people still find difficulty in knowing which restaurants provide this type of menu. It obviously does not hurt to ask the restaurant. But as experience shows, most restaurants do not have one.

Another Possible Solution for Blind People

Restaurants can provide another solution through information technology. Visiting the restaurant’s website is one way for blind people to solve this problem. Before blind people would go to the restaurant, they can check the restaurant’s website if it has a menu. Then they can use their screen reading software to listen to the available meals, drinks, and specials. This helps blind people decide what they want to have before heading to the restaurant.

This, however, is a good solution only if the menu on the website is updated. But then again, there are times when the actual menu in the restaurant itself is not updated.

More importantly, the online menu has to be accessible for blind persons. I personally have experienced checking a restaurant’s menu and finding a PDF file which is not accessible. Sometimes it is just a photo-copy of the regular menu.

Conclusion

It is very helpful for restaurants and similar establishments to provide an alternative way of giving their menus to blind people. Restaurants can either provide a Braille and a large print menu, or include a copy of their menu in their website. Either way, they have to make sure that the alternative format of the menu is updated. And if a restaurant chooses to post the menu in its website, it needs to ensure that the menu is readable and accessible for blind and visually impaired persons.

If you are interested in what a Braille menu looks like, you can go to a restaurant like Ruby Tuesday. There, you can ask for a Braille menu and see for yourself how blind and visually impaired people receive an accessible menu just as you would receive a regular menu.