Personally, I'd rather this was built into blindsquare or one of the other navigation apps. Not only because I'm already using those, so it's one less app to manage, but also because when I'm in a strange city, looking for a place to eat, it would be cool if the gps app I already use could tell me about all of the places it already had the menu for. That way I'd never wind up going into a place, googling for the menu, realizing I can't find it, and then being stuck asking the server for help.

Google Maps usually has a link directly to the menu when available. It's not always there though, and when it is it's often a PDF or image that won't work with a screen reader.

From a very cursory look, it doesn't seem like the menu data is available in Google's Places API, also they charge for use of that API even if it was. They do have a feature that tries to work out what business you might be in based on location and time of day etc, that could be useful.

​

As a developper to do this we will request two things : first restaurant website adress must be the url for there site. Secondly their menu must be in a normalized format that we can read.

If an existing company, for example, JustEat in the UK, who already had a database of restaurants, their locations and their menus, had an API, I couldn't see this being a difficult app to create, in theory. (JustEat is a company that mainly focuses on takeaway / takeout but you get the idea) .


This is the only viable solution to the problem, that I can think of, short of compelling restaurants, world wide, to publish their menus in an agreed format, or a mammoth, ongoing, data gathering effort by the app developer, neither of which are likely or viable.


It's an interesting idea though, maybe I'm wrong, maybe there's another way around it.

Hi. I worked on an app, EyeMenu, that would do exactly this. We never launched the app. Message me if you want more info.

It would be great to integrate this into a navigation app. Check out Almenus. It used to feature menus for restaurants and I would use it often, but it doesn't seem like it's updated much these days.

Forsquare already does this. You may have to do a little digging, but it is worth it.

So I know a fellow who has had a prototype coded up to do exactly this. I did test the prototype and was largely unimpressed with the concept. Issues include the restaurant needing to incorporate some data schema for structuring menu data (I understand there's one out there but it's poorly adopted). This would have to be incorporated so that menu changes are updated in parallel. Who hasn't had a braille menu handed to them that was out of date?

Other issues would be having enuff data to be populated so it's meaningful to the user. Would you get stuck going to the corporate chain that implemented it when that little family run place down the block would have a better experience?

I’d say if independent, just use one of the many phone OCR apps, look up the website / PDF or ask your server

Here's a fun little article on one fellow who describes his sensory consulting practice targeting restaurants and other public venues

https://thetakeout.com/how-restaurants-can-make-dining-seamless-for-blind-peop-1823739501