Matt Wadsworth was never one to shy away from a challenge. Matt was born blind and was one of the first blind children to attend a mainstream secondary school. He was the very first blind student to attend the Royal Academy of Music (RAM), where he developed his own form of Braille tablature for the lute to allow him to consign three-hour long scores to memory. Matt has released six classical albums, one of which was recorded live at the Wigmore Hall, and played in operas and orchestras all over the world. He has also played with the Paraorchestra, a group of talented disabled musicians who sometimes struggle to find professional orchestras to play with, and set up a successful online business.
Good Food Talks was founded in March 2013 and is the brainchild of Matt Wadsworth and Kate Bennett Wadsworth.
Visually impaired people are sociable creatures. They love food, wine and beer, and above all else, they value their independence. Basically, they just want to be treated like anybody else.
There’s something about the restaurant experience, though, that can often make you feel like some kind of special needs case. You’ve either got a dining companion reading the menu, or you’ve got a hurried waiter, who, with the best will in the world, just doesn’t have time to read everything out loud. Then there are Braille menus – a nice gesture on the restaurant’s part, but if you try grappling your way through a Braille menu, everybody else has ordered and you’re still reading through the starters.
With our shared passion for creative problem solving, we put our heads together to invent a universally accessible restaurant menu – the kind of thing someone could read as casually and effortlessly as an ordinary menu. After 4 months of research and testing, we figured out that the ideal medium for this was the device everyone already had in their pockets.
We live in an incredible age of technology. Matt remembers a time when deciding to read a book meant ordering the special Braille version – if it even existed – and then hoping it arrived (in multiple volumes) before you decided you’d rather read a different book. Now, he just orders ordinary e-books for his Kindle app and reads them on his phone. Most smartphones, tablets and computers now come with a host of customizable accessibility features, including a built in screen reader that will speak everything out loud.
For people who have limited vision, you can also enlarge the print, highlight buttons, and even invert all the colours. Every time you upgrade your phone or your operating system, you’ll notice more of these choices.
Optimising a menu for all of these features at once has proved to be a huge challenge and great commitment – as has making sure that the menus on our system are always up to date.
It’s definitely a challenge, but Matt has been known to get a bit of a kick out of challenges.
We never rest, and are always developing, learning, innovating and improving. Right now, it just feels like a great honour to be able to use technology and accessibility to bring value to the restaurant industry.
H Edition spoke exclusively to Matt on his growth and plans into the future
When and how did the app launch?
The iPhone app version launched on 8 September 2015 at the Babylon restaurant at the Roof Gardens in Kensington London. Our service has been up and running for 2 years via a web app. This still works very well, but many of our users prefer a native app experience. It’s taken a lot of hard work to get to this point, but the joy of putting something into the hands of our users, is that we can really respond to what people want.
Have you had many previous bad experiences when dining out?
I’d say I’ve generally had good experiences to be honest. The main problem for a visually impaired person dining out is that you can’t read the menu, or to put it another way, you are reliant on somebody to read it for you. This often leads to people making early choices, so as not to be a Burdon, or just taking a guess at what they think might be available.
How did the process of starting with this idea to launching the app and managing it develop?
At the end of 2012, I was eating in a restaurant with my wife and business partner Kate. As usual, she was reading the menu to me at break-neck speed and I think I chose a burger, just to get the process over with. I’ve always been a problem solver – you have to be if you have any kind of disability, and it’s what makes life interesting.
I said to Kate that for years, I’d wanted to solve the problem of restaurant menus not being accessible for blind and visually impaired people. Some restaurants do offer Braille menus, but they are often out of date, and Braille is a really cumbersome system. By the time you’ve read a Braille menu, everybody else has finished their meal… and you know what, out of the 2 million visually impaired people in the UK, less than 1% actually read Braille.
So, we started a 6 month research project to test and validate our ideas. It was a fascinating journey and we used the Lean Start-up approach, whereby you test your assumptions very quickly in real life, on real people.
We wanted to see if other visually impaired people shared my frustration, and we also wanted to test the business model, I.E. would restaurants be willing to pay for such a service.
How did you manage to get your starting capital?
Once the research phase was over, we had a very strong case for building a minimum viable product (MVP). We actually invested our own money, in the knowledge that if things didn’t work out, we’d be able to apply what we learned to other projects.
Tell us about the restaurants that have embraced the app?
What I love about the restaurants who have embraced GFT is that they very clearly care about customer experience. They are a collection of forward-thinking action takers who want to be inclusive, and can see the value GFt brings to the market, both from a business point of view, and also that making menus accessible to people with print reading difficulties is just the right thing to do.
The problem they have is that it’s actually very difficult to do and requires some very specialist expertise. With the best will in the world, people who run restaurants haven’t got the time or the budget to make the necessary adjustments, and I think this is why GFT is turning out to be such a success.
What feedback have you had from users of the app?
People are loving the solution we have brought to the market. In our research survey, 87% of people said that they currently relied on a dining companion or waiter to read the menu to them. 91% said that being able to make their own menu choices would greatly improve their dining experience. Visually impaired people are sociable creatures, and more than anything, they value their autonomy and independence. I think GFt really fills a very important social need.
Who were your first large clients?
The first restaurant group to sign up to GFT was Carluccio’s. I was introduced to the then CEO Simon Kossoff, who being the forward-thinking and savvy business man he is, very quickly came on board.
This was followed by Pret A Manger, Ed’s Easy Diner, Nando’s and Cote Brasserie. A fairly major pizza chain has just signed up, but they are not live yet, so I’ll keep it a surprise.
We do have a number of independent restaurants and small pub chains like Babylon and Oakman Inns. To begin with, we have concentrated on the chains because it gives us much quicker and wider coverage across the country. They also don’t tend to change their menus too often.
What does the future hold for Good Food Talks?
Now that the iPhone app version is out, we are investing in a completely new platform. The main goal behind the upgrade (apart from being much more professional) is so that we can give independent restaurants the ability to manage their own accounts. It’s not cost effective for us to actively maintain menus which change on a daily or weekly basis, so we haven’t really been able to work with independent restaurants nearly as much as we would have liked. This is about to change though, and we’re seriously excited about it.
Are there any restaurants you would like to have on board within the next few months?
Of the chains, I think we could bring a lot of value to Pizza Express, Wagamama and Wetherspoons. They all have Braille menus, but as I mentioned, less than 1% of visually impaired people read Braille.
What’s the plan for 2016?
Our new platform will be launching at the beginning of 2016. We will continue to bring chains on board, but 2016 will be the year where we really start reaching out to independent restaurants. It’s been a long time coming, so we’re looking forward to working with that particular part of the hospitality industry.
How do you feel the need of visually impaired individuals is progressing?
I think we live in a very good age to be blind or visually impaired. Accessible technology just keeps getting better and better, and things like the iPhone are quite honestly life-changing technologies in terms of what they allow a visually impaired person to do without sighted assistance.
Have you considered expanding this application to other areas of life?
Absolutely. Firstly, I think there is a great deal of value we can bring to the hotel industry. Not just menus and room service, but things like hotel information and where things are in the building itself. We’re keeping an eye on beacon technology, which would allow us to help somebody navigate for instance from their room to the elevator, and then to the restaurant, gym or swimming pool. I’m also looking forward to the day when we can accept payments via GFt. It’s hard enough flagging down a waiter when you want the bill, but if you can’t make eye contact or see the waiter across the room, it’s even harder.