Do you ever trip over furniture when closing up your venue in the dead of the night? How often do you see diners shining their phone flashlights at the menu?

• Make sure your menu is on your website in a screen readable format (not as a PDF or image)
• Make sure the words on your menu are big and easy to read
• Make sure that your restaurant is well lit and that there are no tripping hazards

The World Health Organisation estimates that there are at least 2.2 billion people around the world who have a vision impairment or are blind. Businesses that are visually inaccessible can make it difficult for customers to navigate the physical space and find out what is on the menu.

Using visually friendly design can make it easier for customers to make decisions about what they want to purchase and feel like they are welcomed into the space.

A visually friendly business is one that welcomes:

• people with vision impairments
• people who are blind
• people who are colour blind
• people who have dyslexia
• people who want to find information about your business online

• Add braille signs to the toilet doors.
• Make sure the words on your menu are big and easy to read.
• Make sure that your restaurant is well lit so that patrons can see where they are going and what they are eating.
• Remove any tripping hazards from walkways. This includes cardboard boxes stacked up in the hallways and footstools placed in the entrance way.

• Help customers if they ask you to read out the menu. If the menu is one page long, it would be appropriate to read out the entire menu. If the menu is several pages long, you can describe the headlines and ask the customer for guidance on what they would like read out.
• Do not pet or feed guide dogs unless given permission by the guide dog’s owner. When guide dogs are out side the home, they are on the job and should not be distracted by pets or treats.

Ensure that your printed menu contains the following elements to make it easily visible for everyone.

• Use a sans-serif font (one without the little ‘feet’ or decorations at the end of straight lines) such as Arial, Open Sans or Helvetica.
• Leave plenty of space between paragraphs and don’t feel like you need to fit everything on one page, use two or more if you need to. Leaving appropriate space makes it easier for everyone to read.
• Make sure the text and background have good contrast. Black on white is ideal but if you need to use colours, you can check them with a contrast checker like the WebAIM contrast checker.
• Use bold for headings and avoid using underlines, italics and hyphen-ations, as they add unnecessary visual complication to the text.
• Consider a large format option for people with low vision, using a minimum font size of 18pt

Make sure your menu is on your website in a screen readable format (not as a PDF or an image). Alternatives to printed materials that can increase accessibility include:

• Digital formats can be read by a screen reader, braille conversion device or even just zoomed into on a tablet.
• Audio versions of your materials.
• Braille is not understood by a large portion of vision impaired people in Australia, but for those who can read it, it is the easiest option for them.

Online written menus are picked up by Google and will help to improve your website’s search ranking, which means more potential customers seeing your website.

When adding images to your website or to your social media accounts, make sure to include image descriptions.

• Brewability Lab is a brewery in Englewood, Colorado, USA, that uses a braille menu and braille tap handles to make it accessible for both customers and employees with vision impairments.

• The Visability website provides guidelines for print materials.
• The Web Accessibility Initiative has an Introduction to Web Accessibility that provides more information on how to make your website accessible.
• David Berman’s online accessibility course is a hands on course on website accessibility
• The American Anthropological Association provides guidelines on how to write image descriptions.