Leire Gorrochategui and Jorge del Bosque are mathematicians and work in banking. Jorge says that they are curious, that they like to discover and learn new things. Following this vital premise they made a accessibility course related to web pages and visual impairment. They both really liked the topic and it caught their attention. Jorge has a disability, but nothing to do with the visual field.
Thanks to the course they learned things such as the importance of contrast or text size so that a web page is accessible to a person with visual disabilities. “When you make an accessible website taking these elements into account, it works for all people, it is not like the Braille letter that only the blind can read. If it is well designed it should be accessible to everyone”says Leire. They also learned about the world of screen readers. “They are software that reads the content that you see on the screen and that allows you to enter buttons and links. Screen readers allow you to navigate as you do on a website, only instead of browsing by sight, it is by voice,” says Leire.
“Generally Accessibility problems on web pages are in images and pdfs”Adds Jorge. When a restaurant posts, for example, a photo of its menu, this is of absolutely no use to a visually impaired person. In the best of cases, the voice reader will tell you an image of the restaurant’s menu but nothing more, it cannot read what is in said image.
While the couple was doing their course, Jorge’s cousin was opening a restaurant. They discovered the lack of accessibility on web pages and they thought it would be good for Jorge’s cousin’s new restaurant to have an online menu accessible to people with visual disabilities.
This is how Restaurantes Para Todos was born in 2022, a non-profit association that adapts restaurant menus to make them accessible for people who have a visual disability. “We started in digital format thinking for screen readers,” says Leire, “and now we also print on paper in braille.”
Restaurants for Everyone is a Web page where are all the restaurants that have their adapted menu and also a mobile application that works exactly the same as the web. “All cards have a table of contents so you can go to the different sections without having to go through all the dishes on the menu,” explains Jorge. “This makes it possible for you to go directly to the meat or desserts, for example.” The website and app also include a search engine to search for restaurants by type of food or location.
The couple collaborates with Farpe, the Federation of Hereditary Retinal Dystrophies Associations. Thanks to the requests and guidance of people with visual disabilities, they can correctly prepare accessible restaurant menus. When they started they didn’t know anyone with a visual disability, so they contacted several people through social networks and asked them for help to make sure what they were doing was useful.
The association has the support from different volunteerslike Jorge’s own mother, who is the one who has the braille printer in her house and is in charge of printing the paper menus for the restaurants. The family and the rest of the volunteers make all the materials accessible in both online and paper formats.
“We are still very few restaurants,” says Leire. “We have adapted menus from 1 or 2% of the restaurants in Spain (some 700 letters from 48 provinces),” adds Jorge. “Their thing would be that when a person with a visual disability goes out to eat they can choose from more restaurants,” continues Leire. “This is what we and visually impaired people would like.”
Jorge, Leire and the rest of the volunteers dedicate their free time to Restaurantes Para Todos. “You do what you can,” says Jorge. “We are going to start charging 20 euros for each restaurant that appears on our website because I would like to pay someone to do the job more seriously.”Jorge continues. “We want to delegate,” Leire completes. “As we are now, I don’t see myself growing because it doesn’t give us time or money,” says Jorge.
While they do everything possible to obtain income and be able to hire a person, Leire and Jorge ask us for a favor: “It would help us a lot if When someone goes to a restaurant they talk to them about us and invite them to contact us to join,” says Leire. “The person takes a moment and that is what is best for us to make themselves known,” Jorge concludes.
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