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Restaurant website accessibility: the menu is usually the problem

Most restaurant sites fail on one thing above all others, and it is the single page every customer visits.

Why it matters here specifically. Someone who cannot read your menu cannot decide to come in. This is not a compliance abstraction, it is a booking you never hear about.

What fails on sites like yours

01The menu is a PDF, or worse, a photograph of a PDF

A scanned or exported menu is an image to assistive software. A screen reader announces nothing. It also cannot be enlarged without blurring, and Google cannot read it either, so you lose the search traffic too.

What to do: Publish the menu as real text on a real page. Keep the PDF as a download if you like, but the page is what people and search engines actually use.

02Booking widgets from a third party

Reservation embeds are frequently unlabelled and unreachable by keyboard. If the booking cannot be completed, nothing else on the site matters.

What to do: Test your booking flow with the keyboard alone, start to finish. If it fails, tell your booking provider, and add a phone number prominently as a fallback.

03Text over food photography

Headlines laid across a busy photograph almost never hold contrast across the whole image.

What to do: Add a dark overlay behind the text, or move the text to a solid panel.

04Opening hours inside an image

Same problem as the menu, on the information people most often need.

What to do: Write the hours as text. Add opening hours structured data while you are there; it helps you appear in local search.

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