"Independence means that I get to just be a person, like anybody and everybody else," said Stephanie Jones, marketing director for Menus4ALL.
Jones is vision-impaired. Going to a restaurant and ordering from the menu can be a fraught experience. There are issues that crop up, such as knowing the prices of the items and how much to tip, getting the scope of the full menu offerings, and asking for help.
"I'm a single mother of five. I'm the one who's supposed to be reading the menu and the bill. In my case, my children have to feed it all to me, which is not the world's worst thing. There's some lessons for my children in that, but I want to be Mom. I want to not always have to rely on somebody else," Jones said.
This is where Menus4ALL comes in.
"We launched just before COVID hit in October of 2019," said Helen Fernety, CEO and founder of Menus4ALL. "We focus entirely on people with visual impairments to ensure that they can have an amazing experience when they're out to dinner, starting with being able to read the menu."
Menus4ALL is a website. It works using assistive technology, including Voiceover, NDVA, and JAWS. The menu is read using spoken descriptions, a screen reader, or by Braille display.
A user pulls up the site on their phone and selects "okay" to allow use of the location. If the user is in the restaurant, the restaurant's menu will automatically appear. The menus are in a template that features the restaurant's address, phone number, and hours, plus the menu items and prices. It offers four sizes of texts and color contrast settings.
There are some 75 restaurants in Memphis that have menus on Menus4ALL, with roughly 50,000 menus in total from 12,000 cities uploaded to the site. Menus4ALL gathers the menus via Tripadvisor.
Seeing a need
Fernety was working in Little Rock when she reached out to the World Services for the Blind to offer her services as a web designer. She hooked onto the idea for accessible menus after she had lunch with a visually impaired engineer and recognized how complicated it was for him to order. She thought with her background, she could do something about it.
From there, she started to develop prototypes. She would take potential users to brunch and take their feedback.
"I would do it every week," Fernety said. "I would learn and then I would go back and rework it entirely."
When Fernety moved to Memphis, she reached out to Clovernook Center for the Blind & Visually Impaired, where Jones was a teacher. It was Jones who answered the phone. And, as it so happened, some of Jones' students were learning about navigating restaurants and were asking for real-world experience.
"I haven't seen anything that truly worked," Jones recalled. "The app we were using, it gave us some access, but it was such a convoluted method to try to even get to the information. It literally took us about 15 different screens before we even got to the restaurant name. [Menus4ALL] gave us more access than we had ever had."
Menus4ALL was one of the winners of the Delta I-Fund program in 2019. They took the $7,500 in winnings and built the website. The Delta I-Fund is a startup accelerator, focused on early-stage startups in the Mississippi Delta region.
Menus4ALL is now in testing mode in Memphis, with Cafe Eclectic as a model. Cafe Eclectic owner Cathy Boulden gives feedback on the site. Boulden was able to do away with menus entirely. It saves paper costs and time spent cleaning the menus.
With Menus4All, she's also able to update the menus in real time, so if a special sells out, she can remove it from the menu immediately.
Currently, Fernety and Jones are meeting with investor groups and organizations, such as the American Council of the Blind. They are building an app and have a contract with Cisco. They like to add additional functions to the site, such as the ability to pay the bill through it.
Fernety said their potential market is only growing. There are people whose eyes have been weakened by too much screen time, those with diabetes and eye conditions.
"There's actually more people that will probably need our work, need our product," she said.
