Seeing the need for braille

Seeing the need for braille

Dinner at any restaurant is an experience: we don’t head out solely in search of good food, but atmosphere, company and service. The sounds of wait staff bustling about, flowing conversation, glasses clinking, forks scraping across plates and the ever-satisfying pop of a wine bottle cork combine with the accompanying music of choice to create the soundtrack for your meal. Steaming plates are ferried through the restaurant, wafting their aromas to waiting nostrils as beautifully presented meals land in front of you. Altogether, quite the experience.

Take one sense out of the mix and suddenly dining out is far less pleasurable—especially for those who are visually impaired and the blind. There are 1.5 million people in Britain who are visually impaired, with 87 percent of these diners relying on their dinner companions to read the menu aloud. Not only is this time-consuming and undignified, it is limiting and erodes independence for many customers—everyone wants the same experience and ambience at a restaurant and perusing a menu is one of the small pleasures in dining out. For those who dine alone, it’s almost impossible to choose a meal if they can’t read the menu or the wait staff is too busy to spend the time sounding out the entire list of choices. The obvious solution? Braille menus.

You might think it would be a legal requirement to provide braille menus, but in the US, the Americans With Disabilities Act merely requires blind customers can access a menu—if a blind person can access it online and read it with any of their technology’s accessibility features, that counts. Good enough, right?

Especially since, for the many restaurants with tiny profit margins, braille menus can be cost prohibitive. Much like any translation, a braille menu must be checked for accuracy by specialists and then sent to a printing house with a braille printer; few companies offer all these services in house. This alone is more expensive than regular printing, and costs increase for restaurants with seasonal menus or offerings that change even more frequently.

And that’s the insidiousness of ableism. If we aren’t the ones affected by the disability, we don’t spare it a thought—how many restauranteurs considered providing a braille version when designing their menu? Getting a braille menu made up shouldn’t be this difficult and big chain restaurants have no excuse for not catering to all their customers—they certainly have the money and can afford to put in the effort and the extra printing costs; the more restaurants that do, the cheaper braille printing will become as the forces of supply and demand take hold.

Next time you head to a restaurant, ask if they have a braille menu—tell them you’re checking for a friend. If there’s enough pressure, the industry will meet the demand and provide a menu everyone can access. Besides, accommodating a blind customer will likely turn them into a repeat customer—good for business and good for the visually impaired community.

However, you might also think that as only 1 percent of visually impaired people in the UK can even read braille, there’s simply no point in creating a special menu. After all, there are plenty of apps available that house databases of menus and use the accessibility functions to unlock the choices in various establishments. For many then, the ubiquity of the smartphone makes it the optimal solution. But what about those who can’t afford the technology or those who simply want exactly the same experience as everyone else—much like reading an e-book lacks the tactility of a paperback, holding a fancy menu beats scanning a PDF. If a person doesn’t want to have a companion or waiter read a menu aloud, why should they have to rely on their smartphone to do so? Imagine the exclusion the blind and deaf experience.

Accessibility features work wonders for many people who need them but it’s worth considering whether they’re appropriate for everyone and ensuring those people are catered to. Is braille a dying language because of said accessibility features on technology?