Case study: a multi-location restaurant group takes its menus out of pictures

Where it started

An initial audit found:

• Zoom was blocked by the viewport tag, so people couldn't enlarge text on a phone.
• Menus were published as images with empty alt text, so a screen reader announced nothing.
• There was no skip link and no main landmark.
• Every location page used the same main heading, so the pages couldn't be told apart.
• Some PDFs had no text layer, and others were untagged and untitled.

Round one: the template

The first round fixed the shared template: zoom unlocked, a skip link and main landmark, one H1 per page, an alt text fallback, a pause control for video, a label for a form's anti-spam field, visible focus rings and support for the “reduce motion” setting. Spot checks of key pages confirmed no empty alt text and a single H1 on each.

It was real progress. Yet a later full-site scan still returned a failing score in the 20s, with hundreds of serious and moderate issues. The most critical findings were a menu published as an image and pages made entirely of images.

Round two: the content

Template fixes can't reach content that's baked into pictures. In one focused push, the team worked through the content itself:

• Hundreds of text alternatives written for price charts, promotions and menu images.
• Menus rebuilt as live HTML text, with prices as text, checked and approved by the restaurant team.
• Price tables and specials moved into editable text fields, so staff update words and numbers, not images.
• Menu PDFs rebuilt as tagged, titled documents.
• The location list turned into real links.
• The accessibility statement and privacy policy rewritten.

The scores, over time

• Before the content work: a failing score in the 20s
• Early in the content work: little movement
• Once the image menus were replaced: into the 90s
• Within a few weeks of the first full scan: a perfect score

The leap came from the content work, not from another template change.

A side effect: a faster site

Replacing heavy images with text made pages far lighter. A key page dropped to less than half its former weight, its mobile Lighthouse performance score nearly doubled, and layout shift, the jumping around as a page loads, all but disappeared.

What we'd tell another restaurant group

• Fix the template first, but don't stop there. A clean template with picture menus still fails.
• Make the menu text the source of truth. Designs and PDFs can be generated from it.
• Give staff a text field for specials. Otherwise the next promotion arrives as an image.
• Measure over time. A dated record of scores is what shows the work was done.