This made it to page one inside the magazine :)
Read the heavily edited version of the story here or see below.
Photo: Vivek Muthuramalingam for OPEN magazine
Read the heavily edited version of the story here or see below.
Photo: Vivek Muthuramalingam for OPEN magazine
In the upmarket Bangalore neighbourhood of
Koramangala, restaurants have to reinvent themselves to keep people interested.
There always are cheaper or cooler places to go to. But at Om, a vegetarian
restaurant popular with the office crowd for its thalis, it isn’t about hipness. It’s about being convenient even
for the differently-abled. Om has menu cards in Braille for the visually
challenged and in large fonts for those with low vision.
A chance conversation and proximity to EnAble India,
an NGO that works with the differently-abled, set things in motion. The EnAble
India office is close to the shopping complex which houses Om restaurant and
its employees and volunteers often eat lunch there. Among other things, the NGO
has programs for the visually challenged. These groups too frequent the
restaurant, holding each other’s hands, their white sticks tapping against the
concrete floor. One afternoon, Bhavna Jain, the owner of Om, met Gangamma, a
21-year old visually-challenged Bharatanatyam dancer who had just returned
after performing in the US. When it was time to order, the girl asked a waiter
to read out the menu to her. “That’s when it struck me how unfair it was that
someone who could travel the world had to depend on someone else for something
as mundane as ordering her lunch,” says Jain.
Gayathri Iyer, Sharath H N and a team of a few
others from EnAble India, all visually challenged themselves, volunteered to
design the menu card in Braille. On Ugadi festival this year in April, Om
Restaurant made it possible for the visually challenged to be a little more
independent. “We complain about such small things when we go out, but we don’t
realize what the visually challenged have to contend with. In countries abroad
there are many facilities for them, not so in India,” says Jain.
Sharath, who is visually-challenged and was part of
the group that designed the menu card, says, “It (the menu card) was one of our
employability projects, which also include money pouches to identify currency
notes, taking print outs, etc. There was another restaurant which also printed
their menu card in Braille, but never used it. Om is the only one which does.”
Om restaurant has a dozen menu cards in all, two of
which are in Braille and use large fonts. For now, EnAble India has kept one
with them. Apart from thali, the restaurant serves a few other meals. “It isn’t
an extensive menu. Though our visually challenged patrons know what’s on the
menu, they still ask for the card,” says Jain. She says that the patronage from
the visually challenged has increased after the Braille menu card was
introduced.
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