Cookie Consent by Free Privacy Policy website Starbucks offers Aira creating accessible experience for blind and low vision customers
marzo 15, 2021 - Starbucks

Starbucks offers Aira creating accessible experience for blind and low vision customers

Comunicato Stampa disponibile solo in lingua originale. 

Through a smartphone #app, San Diego-based Aira Tech Corp connects #people who are blind and low-vision to highly trained, remotely-located visual interpreters to provide instant access to visual information.

As a girl, #susanmazrui lived close to two libraries where, each week, she and her sister would go check out the limit – 12 books from each. She checked out books on cultural anthropology, history, natural sciences. She explored the world around her through the words in
those books, she said.

But that ended when she was 17 and went blind due to multiple sclerosis. Back then, in the 1970s, there were few accessibility options, said Mazrui, who describes herself as “curious about almost everything.”

Losing her ability to see words has been one of the hardest things, she said. “It’s everywhere – signs, instructions and labels, menus, ” she said.

Mazrui, now 58, says if she could talk to her teenage self, she’d tell her, “You’d be amazed at what #technology can do.”

“It helps me scan the environment and learn what’s there and do it quickly, ” she said.

For instance, a service called Aira, which #starbucks began offering for free today in all U.S. stores in #partnership with San Diego-based Aira Tech Corp. Aira connects blind and low-vision #people to trained visual interpreters who provide instant access to visual information through a third-party smartphone #app.

Earlier this month, Susan walked into a Seattle #starbucks and, using Aira, was able to ask a remote agent to describe the layout of the store so she could navigate to the order line and point-of-sale, read the menu to her and describe options in the pastry and Ready-to-Eat and
Drink cases and on the counters.

“It helps me scan the environment and learn what’s there and do it quickly, she said.

Instead of having to try to remember what’s on the menu, and possibly miss new seasonal options, through Aira, “I can be like every other customer with the same number of choices, ” she said.

Creating Connection through Inclusion And Accessibility

Starbucks first tested Aira service in seven U.S. cities early this year, including at its Signing Store in Washington, D.C., one of nine Signing Stores globally that provide a space for the Deaf and hard of hearing community to connect through sign language and celebrate Deaf culture.

Partners (employees) who work at these stores are all proficient in sign language.

Matthew Gilsbach, store manager at the D.C. Signing Store, says the customer reaction to Aira service “has been nothing short of positive. It’s one more tool that that we can use for customers to be themselves and be independent. And customers and partners both feel that
there are no more barriers between them. They can get to know each other, build relationships and have those connections: one human to another human.”

Further information in the press release to download