About Good Food Talks
GoodFoodTalks makes it easy for visually impaired diners to eat out at thousands of UK restaurants by providing accessible menus right on their website and their iPhone or Android app.
We commissioned GearedApp to work with us to create our app. This was a particularly challenging project, as the app needed to be fully accessible for both blind and partially sighted users and therefore optimised for a whole range of accessibility features, each with its own set of priorities. We found GearedApp to be professional, creative, responsive, and unrelenting in their commitment to get things right. We can’t recommend them highly enough.
On a Mission to Open Menus for Everyone
Good Food Talks were looking develop a menu reader app for those who are blind or visually impaired.
The founder of Good Food Talks, Matt, who is blind himself, explained to us that those with poor vision or other reading barriers normally rely on others around them to read out the menu in restaurants. Even for those who have some vision, small font, strange colours and poor contrast can get in the way and very few restaurants are able to provide a large print version of the menu.
Talking Menus that Empower Users
With every problem there is a simple solution. With some research Good Food Talks identified that the best solution to this problem was right under their nose. Using a smartphone, we were able to develop a mobile app that can speak the menu out loud to users, and can be customised to fit different needs. This provides an accessible menu right in your pocket.
Advanced Accessibility Features
This app is uniquely designed to work with iOS accessibility features that increase accessibility for blind and low-vision users. These features include VoiceOver, a screen reader. VoiceOver speaks everything on your phone out loud, and by using this feature blind users can independently browse menus at their leisure. For those who don’t need VoiceOver, but just need an easy-to-read menu, the app also harnesses iOS Dynamic
Scalable Backend
This app has been designed with scalability in mind. The backend of the platform allows for the Good Food Talks team to add menus over time as more restaurants onboard into the app. We have also spent time integrating directly with national chains APIs so that the app is always up-to-date with the latest menu changes.
We used FlutterFlow to build the app, as it allowed us to rapidly build and test an app, focussing on the accessibility features that were essential for our end users.
Firebase was used for the backend of the app, which is a Backend as a Service platform providing all the tools we needed to build the platform within our timescales.
The Outcome for Good Food Talks
Since we started working with Good Food Talks in 2014, we have helped them to launch an initial version of the app which was a great success helping them to roll out across the UK. We have since continued to develop the app, and it is now in-use in the UK across large chains such as Pret a Manger, Nandos, JD Wetherspoons and TGI Fridays, to name a few. It has been an honour to help Good Food Talks on their mission to empower visually impared users, and are looking forward to continuing to help them grow.
