In 2026, nearly every major chain restaurant I order from has moved to online ordering. A lot of them offer perks and discounts if I order through their website or app, but as a blind customer using a screen reader, most of those perks are out of reach because their systems are not accessible. Inaccessible ordering also chips away at my independence.
I am kicking off a mini series here, walking through each stage of the chain restaurant online ordering process, starting with menu navigation.
Each restaurant chain lays out its menu a little differently, but I keep hitting the same category navigation problems no matter which one I open. The biggest issue for me is that moving between menu sections is rarely accessible. I keep seeing two design patterns in particular.
The first design puts the menu categories in a horizontal bar at the top of the screen. Clicking a category name scrolls the menu down to that section. On paper, it sounds simple, but I run into a few problems.
My screen reader treats the entire list of categories as a single block of plain text on many restaurant sites. It reads them aloud as a single, uninterrupted string of words. I cannot isolate or activate any of the options because they are not recognized as buttons or in-page links. It's the kind of thing a real accessibility audit catches before launch.
Even when the category bar works and I jump to a section, getting back to that category bar often means scrolling all the way to the top. The bar is visually pinned to the screen the whole time, but my screen reader cannot reach it from where I am. That mismatch between what is on screen and what I can access frustrates me on chain restaurant menus more than almost anything else.
The second design I see a lot is a vertical list of expandable sections. Each section opens to reveal its menu items when I activate it. A few things go wrong here.
Sometimes the category buttons do not respond when I activate them with my screen reader, and the section never expands. Other times, my focus jumps straight to the heading of the next section as soon as a category opens. I end up either browsing the menu backward or scrolling back up the page to find the start of the section I actually wanted.
The label on the category button also breaks when a section expands in many menus. My screen reader cannot relocate the section heading, so I cannot close the expanded section to tighten up the menu view. By the time I have opened two or three categories, the page feels like a maze.
I also run into trouble when my screen reader announces the actual menu items. The first issue is with prices. Sometimes my screen reader does not announce the price at all, or it reads out a price that is just plain wrong.
I recently ordered from a fast-food burger chain where every menu item was listed as "Zero Dollars," even though the prices were displayed correctly on the page. I did not realize what the meal actually cost until I got to checkout. Moments like that are why I take chain restaurant accessibility personally.
Other times, my screen reader skips over the small text description under the menu item. My guess is that the description text is baked into the graphic-based text boxes for visual appeal, and my screen reader doesn't pick it up. So I get the item name, but none of the details that tell me what is actually in the food.
Most chain restaurant menus also use small images of each item. The pictures usually have no alternative text, so I have no idea what they depict. On a restaurant menu, that one hurts more than on other sites, because so much of what makes a food item look appealing comes through in the picture.
Missing alt text is the kind of thing a free automated accessibility test flags right away, which makes it strange that so many chain restaurant menus still ship without it.
I have noticed recently that more chain restaurant ordering menus include quick-action buttons right within the menu list. One example is a button that lets me add the item to my order without opening the item details screen. Two things usually break these buttons for me.
First, the buttons rarely have proper text labels in the code. My screen reader either reads nonsense or skips them entirely. I do not even know they are there unless someone tells me.
Second, my screen reader treats the entire food entry as a single web element on a lot of these menus. The title, description, price, and any buttons all get read in one shot. That is fine while I am skimming the menu, but it becomes a problem when an actionable button is inside that block.
I cannot isolate the quick add button and activate it on its own, so the shortcut is useless to me. Figuring out where to start on something like this varies by team. Automated scans catch some of it, but the deeper grouping issue takes a human eye.
In my experience, no. Some chains are better than others, but I almost always hit at least one of the issues I described above on any given order.
The category bar is being treated as a single block of text. It is everywhere I look, and it stops me before I even get to the food.
Two reasons. They usually have no real text label in the code, and they get lumped into the rest of the menu entry as a single element. Either way, I cannot reach them.
The category navigation. If I cannot move around the menu, nothing else really matters.
Chain restaurant online ordering accessibility has a long way to go, and I feel it every time I try to place an order as a blind customer. The category bar, the menu readouts, and the quick add buttons each broke for me on real chain restaurant sites, and I have not even reached checkout yet. None of these is an exotic problem. They are the kind of thing a serious look at accessibility on a chain restaurant menu would catch on day one.
The cost of doing the work is rarely what keeps these issues alive. It's that nobody on the team is checking.
I am going to keep writing about the digital accessibility of chain restaurants as I move through the rest of the ordering flow. Item detail screens, the cart, and checkout from a blind customer's perspective are still to come.
This is a guest post from our marketing contributor, Michael Taylor. It reflects his opinions and experiences. Read more about Michael and some other posts on his experience online here.