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Putting accessibility on the menu

MenuVox serves up digital restaurant menus for those with sight loss
By: Deborah Smyth
May 14, 2019
Kevin Shaw, wearing sunglasses, sits outside against a white railing, with a body of water and Vancouver skyline behind him

Kevin Shaw, MenuVox founder, aims to make online restaurant menus accessible to users who are blind or living with low vision, with support from the Accessibility Project.

Many of us take reading a restaurant menu for granted. Not Kevin Shaw.

Shaw, program manager for entrepreneurship and innovation at the CNIB Foundation, lost his sight after he finished high school, and turned his frustration with inaccessible online menus into a business idea. That idea – MenuVox – recently received funding and support from the Accessibility Project, a collaborative initiative between The Chang School of Continuing Education, DMZ and Sandbox by DMZ.

“As somebody who lives with sight loss, I’m usually trying to make things accessible to me,” he said. Shaw got the idea for MenuVox when he was at a restaurant waiting for a friend. He tried reading the restaurant menu using optical character recognition (OCR) software on his phone, but it wasn’t recognizing the text, which was superimposed on a picture. “So I thought, there has to be an easier way to do this,” he said. And a business idea was born.

“The way MenuVox is designed to work,” he explained, “is that, whichever restaurant you’re sitting in, the menu is pushed to your phone, based on your location.”

The mobile solution uses GPS, WiFi positioning and Bluetooth beacons to display the menu at the user’s location. These menus are interactive and navigable via a screen reader on their devices. A prototype for Jack Astor’s, Milestones and Pickle Barrel restaurants has been developed and is now in the testing phase, with plans to build a native iOS application available to users on the Apple app store.

Kevin Shaw, wearing a red shirt, two women and two men wearing dark shirts, sit in a meeting room around a table working on their laptops.]

Kevin Shaw (in red) and his team work on developing MenuVox. Photo courtesy of Benedict Wong.

Shaw, who graduated from the RTA program in 2003 and earned a master’s degree in media production in 2010, credits Ryerson with fuelling his entrepreneurial spirit. In 2014, following a crowdfunding campaign, Shaw launched TellMeTV (external link) , the world’s first 100 per cent described video-on-demand service for blind and partially sighted people, which incubated at the DMZ.

“I was inspired to venture out into the world of entrepreneurship thanks to the industry professionals who served as my instructors and mentors in both my undergrad and graduate programs,” said Shaw. “Their knowledge of the business world plus their insistence that I not make their mistakes, inspired me to take chances with starting my company.”

His role at the CNIB involves assisting people who are blind and partially sighted in achieving their dreams and starting their own businesses, and in using technology to improve accessibility.

Through the Accessibility Project, MenuVox received funding, business coaching and guidance from The Chang School and DMZ’s industry mentors.

“Through the Accessibility Project, our team learned the importance of an audience-centred approach in building a digital product, and we gained a deeper understanding of the needs of the accessibility community as a whole,” said Shaw. “These resources helped shape our product road map and ultimately helped solidify both our project’s goals and the impact we are determined to have on merging the gap between the restaurant industry and the accessibility community.”

Food for thought, indeed.

To learn more about the program and the application process, visit The Chang School of Continuing Education Accessibility Project website.

Infographic reads: MenuVox: Restaurant menus made accessible. Vision loss: Anyone who has partial to no sight, including those legally blind, or have cataracts. Problem (menu icon): People with sight loss struggle with the lack of accessibility in restaurant menus. (map of Ontario icon) 40% of people/individuals with sight loss in Canada live in Ontario. Ideas (phone icon and graph icon): Began with two paths: work with restaurant staff to train them better, or design an app for customers. Research (table and chairs icon): Around 500,000 Canadians are living with significant sight loss. Pain points: Ordering food, locating restaurants, and lack of accessible menus. Process (hand pushing button icon): User testing, interviews, and surveys helped with accessibility and functionality of the prototype. Solution: Develop an accessible menu app for iPhone with Bluetooth beacons to integrate at restaurants. MenuVox: Team #1. Franco Cesario, James Lowe, Amrita Banik, Toria Morrison and Benedict Wong (MP8986/RTA924). “Fast Facts about Vision Loss.” CNIB – Fast Facts about Vision Loss, www.cnib.ca/en/about/media/vision-loss/pages/default.aspx. Designed by Benedict Wong.]

MenuVox infographic.

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