Finger Food | The Tampa Tribune
Lou and Joyce Fioritto are owners of Braille Works International, a company
that specializes in making Braille and Large Print menus for restaurants.
By JEFF HOUCK
The Tampa Tribune
Published: April 29, 2008
SEFFNER - It's 1993. Husband and wife Lou and Joyce Fioritto are sitting down for dinner at their local Chi-Chi's Mexican food franchise in Cleveland.
A waitress brings menus to the table. Included in the batch: a Braille version for Lou, who is blind.
He is ecstatic. Usually someone has to read him the menu.
"I had never seen one," he says.
His wife, who is sighted, tells him not to touch it. "They had salsa spilled all over it, and it didn't have a cover," she says.
"I still wanted to read it," he remembers. "I didn't know jalapeno was spelled with a J. It was my first time reading a menu on my own. I was 48 years old then. I know it sounds stupid for a man my age to say that, but it was fascinating to read the menu."
After ordering his food, he had one more request of the server: that she leave the menu at the table.
For Fioritto, whose retinas were burned as an infant after doctors overdosed the oxygen in his incubator, it was as if a new realm of literature had opened to him.
"I wanted to read it," he says. "It was amazing."
That experience led the couple to start their own Braille printing company, Braille Works, in the basement of their home, first printing TTY (text telephone) instruction books for AT&T. They soon branched out to restaurants, phoning national chains to solicit their business. Eventually, they persuaded Applebee's and Bob Evans to produce large-print and Braille menus for the visually impaired.
The company, which now has 13 employees, is among a handful nationwide that provide such services. The Fiorittos moved Braille Works to Seffner in 1996 and now operate from an office park off State Road 92. Braille Works takes PDF (portable document format) versions of each company's menu and types it into a computer with software that translates it into Braille.
One room at the headquarters houses rows of machines that spit out reams of paper embossed with Braille dots. A row of tables supports printers that can emboss 1,000 double-sided Braille pages in eight hours. A faster machine in one corner can do 1,000 pages an hour.
During one day this month, three versions of Cracker Barrel's menu were in the middle of the printing process. Most chains order one version of their menu for nationwide distribution, providing two copies to each restaurant. Cracker Barrel orders 20 different versions to accommodate regional dishes and buys three for each location. Applebee's has more than 100 variations and orders reprints two to three times a year.
With 10 million blind or visually impaired people in the United States, it makes business sense to cater to that segment of the population. A Miami company, Taylannas Inc., last year introduced Menus That Talk, a bilingual device about the size of a DVD movie case. Press a button on the portable console and the menu describes what's available in each category.
Many companies served by Braille Works, including P.F. Chang's and California Pizza Kitchen, purchase a dual-purpose menu, with large print in the front and Braille in the back. Imagine a menu with all the pretty colors and photos of delicious food removed. In their place, pages of black Arial font food listings.
"It looks pretty boring," Lou Fioritto says. "We actually tested it when we started the company. What we learned was that the attractive print where you're changing type styles, colors, bolding and that type of stuff, to people with certain eye conditions, every time you change typeface, they have to refocus. Instead of helping them, you're actually making it harder to read."
Spacing between items also was an issue. Too little of it confuses blind readers. (A fact Fioretto learned as a customer at an Applebee's they printed for in Cleveland.) The couple occasionally quibble about the menus' appearance.
"She'll say, 'It doesn't look good,'" he says. "I don't care. It feels good."
Some restaurants try to dodge the issue of blind customers by having servers offer to read the menu aloud. It's an impractical option, especially with a dining room full of loud-talking patrons.
"What do you wind up doing? You say, 'Just give me a burger. I'll take a cheeseburger and fries,' even though you might not want that," Fioritto says.
A restaurateur who owned more than a dozen eateries in New York City once rebuffed Fioritto's pitch by saying that he never gets blind customers.
"Yeah, right," he says. "In Manhattan, of all places."
With food prices skyrocketing, some restaurants balk at the price of printing additional menus, only to have the prices for meals change. Braille Works charges, on average, about $7 per menu, depending on the size and complexity of shipping demands. (By comparison, five of the talking menus cost $120 a month to lease.)
Red Lobster, which constantly has to deal with market prices for seafood, solved the problem, Fioritto says, by listing certain offerings as $12 to $18.
Still, changing the restaurant world is a slow process. Mom-and-pop eateries rarely offer menus for the visually impaired. Some larger chains have responded only after the threat of lawsuits or prodding by sighted customers.
One chain, which has 40 menu offerings, hired Braille Works to print its menus - with only 10 items on the menu.
"They're going to decide what 10 items you're going to eat," Fioritto says. "One of our employees felt like e-mailing them back and saying, 'Oh, you're blond. Here are 10 items. She's a brunette so she's got a full menu. If you want anything else, ask her.'"