Putting accessibility on the menu

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.

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.