About Sightless Chef

We are a group of students at Olin College of Engineering in a class for Technology, Accessibility, and Design. We've chosen to work with Brian Charlson at the Carroll Center for the Blind to create an accessible website full of accessible recipes and cooking tips. On the sidebar, you can find links to our cooking website, Sightless Chef, and to our full design process.

What is Sightless Chef?

Sightless Chef is our answer to a lack of accessible cooking resources for those who are visually impaired. It's a website of user submitted recipes and tips that are worded to be accessible; recipe instructions don't rely on visual indicators, and tips talk about everything from separating eggs and measuring out quantities of oil to setting up a clean, organized workstation without sight based cues. We designed our website to follow W3C accessibility guidelines and formatted the website specifically for screen readers. Sightless Chef is styled with Skeleton css, avoiding the stigma of a "sight-hostile" website specifically for those with visual impairments.

We want Sightless Chef to help fill in gaps for those who often find conventional cooking resources inaccessible, without setting a limit on their ability to improve as cooks. Experienced chefs and first timers alike can find recipes and tips to work confidently in their own kitchens. They can also upload their favorite recipes and tips to share their knowledge and experience with others who are visually impaired and who would also benefit from shared expertise.

Why Sightless Chef?

Cooking resources are dispersed over the internet and in physical cookbooks. It can be difficult to obtain cooking resources geared for people who have vision impairments; most recipes and other instructions are written for people who can rely on visual clues. Braille cookbooks are expensive, so would-be chefs with visual impairments often turn to internet resources. Unfortunately, recipe websites are difficult or impossible to navigate with a screen reader, and still rely on visual indicators for cooking. Youtube videos are only a little more helpful; they refer to video visuals, but they give more helpful audible cues while cooking.

Most cooking implements are also made to visually convey information, and special adaptive tools are expensive. Conventional cooking appliances can also be hard to navigate without specific knowledge. Electric mixers, for example, can be more dangerous to use because of their spinning blades. Most visually impaired chefs prefer to work with their hands, but they learn techniques like this in specialized class, which can also be expensive. Chefs also frequently improvise their own ways to make sight-based cues helpful and hack their own home kitchens to accomodate their needs, but this takes up a large portion of their time. This knowledge also isn't easily dispersed among the community, and needs an outlet to be shared.

People who are visually impaired and want to cook therefore face a gauntlet of barriers; learning to cook new recipes can require a good chunk of money, time, creativity, and patience. Given the high unemployment rate among those who are blind, most people can't afford the expensive solutions that exist. As a result, people who are recently visually impared have a difficult time starting to cook for themselves, and experienced chefs have to invest a larger amount of effort.

With Sightless Chef, we hope that visually impaired cooks, and aspiring cooks, can come to our website and quickly find a recipes and cooking tips that suit their experience and tastes. They won't face difficulty accessing the site with their screen readers, and the recipes are written with reference to senses that are helpful, like smell, sound, and feeling. Sightless Chef also has tips on how to adapt kitchen tools, how to interact with specific ingridients, and how to adapt different kitchen taks for each recipe. We are creating a place for people who are visually impaired to share and find cooking knowledge at no. Beginners can start to learn to navigate their kitchens with order, and experts can trade advanced techniques and recipes without the hassle of having to translate conventional recipes.

Where is Sightless Chef?

Sightless Chef is (for now) housed on a heroku app at: https://sightless-chef.herokuapp.com/ .

How to contribute

If you are interested in working with content on Sightless Chef or the site itself, that's great! Our entire project is open source, and we want to keep it that way. We're always looking for accessible recipes and cooking tips. You can submit those on the Sightless Chef website. We value spreading accessible web development too,and are happy to talk more about our design principles. You can get started by reading the W3C accessibility guidelines. You can contact us via our GitHub handles. That's @frackleton, @arianaolson419, @poosomooso, and @KaitlynKeil.