Going to a bar or a restaurant has no more secret than going to the chosen place, sitting down and ordering. However, the task is not so easy for everyone: despite the fact that since 2008 Spain must guarantee, by lawaccessibility for people with disabilities, blind people depend on waiters, among other things, to know what they can order and what price it has, since menus in braille are not abundant.
The ONCE handles requests for transcription into Braille from the regional centers and through the emails of the Spanish Braille Commission. However, they estimate that the percentage of letters transcribed is low: “we do not know the exact number, as there are various ways through which establishments can request them: through the Spanish Braille Commission or the various ONCE centers through those who receive the requests. In any case, there will only be a few hundred, which will always be a tiny percentage, out of the more than 300,000 establishments. In addition, we ran into the difficulty of keeping them up to date”.
It is precisely this lack of menus in braille that is the only obstacle in a restaurant to Martí Batalla i Busquets, writer and musician specializing in classical guitar and harmonica. “In most restaurants, the menu is not transcribed into Braille and, therefore, we have to have it read to us, which can sometimes be difficult.” Batalla says that he feels better cared for when he comes to the restaurant alone than when he does so with company. “For example: if we go to a restaurant together, they will ask you what you want and then they will also ask you what I want, or they will put sugar in my coffee without asking. They are small things, but they touch my morale ”.
TO Montse Urán, a professional cook and an amateur musician, the detailed descriptions of the dishes offered in haute cuisine restaurants help her to imagine the dish — “just listening to them, salivate” — and, in other types of restaurants, she asks them to explain the menu. or, if the staff is very busy, ask for recommendations. And in the previous step, that is, when choosing where to eat this time, he is guided in a similar way: “the publications in the media and blogs, the restaurant websites and, also, the recommendations they give me are useful my cook friends I value all this information and I take the experience as field work, as a game”.
For the cook, who does not consider that she should notify her disability when making a reservation, there is still a great deal of ignorance about visual impairment. “To begin with, things need to be naturalized. I have come across actions that were not necessary, like that time I asked for toast with ham and they cut the bread into cubes. I was upset: no one asked me if I wanted it that way, but rather they took it for granted that because I was blind I wouldn’t be able to eat a piece of toast”. Among the things she hates the most, she affirms, is infantilization: “I remember a very bad experience, in a restaurant three-starred, when the waitress told us that we could ‘hold with our little hands and eat with our little mouths’. She turned my guts and when they sent me the satisfaction survey, I commented on it. Of course: I am clear that our disability should not be used to enslave the room staff so that they do what we want. We have to go with a sporting and conciliatory spirit: you cannot go with an ax in your hand if you want to gain ground and have a better understanding of our disability”.
However, Urán frequents all kinds of restaurants and says he has no problem eating. “We have to have the same eating skills as anyone, knowing that everyone, whether we see it or not, can drop a piece of lettuce off the plate.” He describes that once at the table, he feels the plates by their base to recognize their shape and how he should proceed in the act of using the cutlery with respect to crockery and food. “You look at the plate and I explore it. In the end, a dish has a lot of information and, sometimes, the vision does not allow the rest of the sensations to flow well, to which we pay no attention”.
The gastronomic critic Jonatan Armengol, the only blind person in his profession in Spain, says that access to the menu is not his biggest problem. “The most difficult thing is usually finding a table on the terrace or a bathroom. There is always someone who can read the menu and its prices, and it is the most convenient, because reading a menu in Braille is something slow and cumbersome, many times you don’t feel like it and, furthermore, it is unhygienic: how were the hands of the person who read them? Have you been there before?” Armengol points out that braille is out of use and that only 1% of the blind know how to read it. “People under 35 are already very involved in technology and use applications like Sinai, from Microsoft, with which we focus on a letter and read it, or with Envision, which uses artificial intelligence to read a letter and answer questions. about it, like what dishes are vegan or what cocktails there are”.
Saman Farhadi is blind and waiter-guide at Dans Le Noir Madrid, a restaurant where you eat completely in the dark and the dishes are not discovered until the end of the evening. “Clients are surprised that we can do this job and I always say the same thing: doing it well does not depend on vision but on each person’s capabilities. They do not imagine that we can have that precision without seeing. They get dirty a lot!”
Farhadi explains that at home he cooks and serves the people who visit him, and that he does so in the restaurant. “You learn the space and you orient yourself without seeing. The biggest difficulty is relating to the distance between you and the client, and between the client and the table, as well as everything that must be placed on the table”. The waiter says that it is a matter of spatial memory, although sometimes it is possible that the clients change, for example, the place of the drink. Therefore, the drinks are given in hand. “And, sure, there are small accidents, but as it happens in all places: it does not depend on the view.” As a customer, Farhadi also misses more menus in braille, that the waiters are aware that it can be difficult for us to get their attention and, in addition, he feels the tactile POS as an obstacle. In this sense, Armengol celebrates QR ordering systems, through which the dishes and drinks to be consumed are selected and, at the same time, paid for, such as Ágora or Sunday.
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