Restaurants join the dots Raul Dias,TNN | Apr 26, 2015, 05.24 AM IST Two years ago when visually impaired Bharatnatyam dancer, Gangamma, 22, visited the US for a performance series, she was amazed at how aware people were about visual impairment. Almost every restaurant, for instance, offered her a Braille or audio menu. For the first time in her life she could order a meal for herself without asking for help as she often did back home in Bengaluru. Around the same time, Bhavna Jain was looking forward to doing something different at her vegetarian restaurant Om in Bengaluru's tony neighbourhood of Koramangala. A chance encounter with Gangamma led Jain to seek the help of EnAble India, an NGO that works with the differently abled, to come up with a Braille menu. She followed it up with an audio menu soon after. Om now has a steady stream of visually impaired and other differently abled people coming in to dine.
Moses Chowdari Gorrepati, programme manager, training and solutions at EnAble India, says that creating the Braille menu became a student project for the NGO. "From selecting the paper to getting Braille printers, everything was undertaken by our 2013 batch of students.It gave the students a sense of purpose, but it also allowed visually impaired people to dine with dignity," says Gorrepati. `May I Help You?' started as a random event to mark World Disability Day at Mumbai's Copper Chimney on December 3, 2009. Every diner was handed a Braille menu that was read out to them by visually impaired volunteers from the National Association for the Blind (NAB). But the idea stuck on. To day, the upscale multi-cui sine restaurant has its own permanent set of leather-bound Braille menus. Not everyone who is visually impaired can read Braille. "My visual impairment was gradual and it was only recently that I became totally blind," says Hyderabad-based disability consultant Raghavendra Satish Peri who is ra Satish Peri who is struggling to master Braille. "Although a Braille menu is a great idea, restau rants need to adopt a more holistic ap proach for visually impaired customers, right from soft skills training for their staff to providing al ternatives for diners like me who can't read Braille." Chennai's Ka lakkal Cafe in Kottur puram understands the needs of diners like Peri. Positioned as India's first `inclusive' cafe, this rampequipped cafe is run by Vidya Sagar, an NGO working for children and adults with special needs. Not only does the cafe have Braille menus, but it also has pictorial menus, tactile walls and even some eating aids -nifty apps like All Access where users can scan logos and QR codes to access menus. Chungwa, a 40-year-old Chinese and Thai restaurant in Delhi's Greater Kailash area, recently teamed up with Radio Mirchi's corporate social responsibility division and NAB to come up with a Braille menu. Chicken Formosa is just a touch away for visually impaired foodie Naveed Khatri and his friends from NAB. "India is home to around 12 million visually impaired people and providing us with menus we can decipher is important. After all, we pay the same as anyone else," asserts Khatri. So, what stops other eateries from offering Braille menus? Besides, apathy , it's the high cost involved in their production, says Nidhi Arora, founder of Esha, a non-profit initiative that makes Braille cards and tactile maps. Esha was also making Braille menus until a few years ago but stopped as there wasn't enough demand. Gorrepati's students at EnAble have also made Braille menu cards for another Bengaluru restaurant, Shanthi Sagar, at around Rs 400 per piece. "This was a simple card paper menu.But the price rises to around Rs 1,000 for the fancier, spiral-bound black and yellow art paper menu we made for Om," he says. Stay updated on the go with Times of India News App. Click here to download it for your device. 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