Blind teenager launches project to change the way restaurants serve visually impaired patrons
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When his favorite restaurants didn't have menus written in Braille, Mason Fessenden decided to make them on his own.
Fessenden, 18, lives in Monrovia, California. The Temple City High School senior is blind, and he told ABC 7 Los Angeles that Braille menus give people who are visually impaired more independence. "Before the menus, I felt sort of like I wasn't included," he said. "I was excluded from what was on the menu. I heard my parents' voices."
Fessenden was inspired to create the menus as part of a school project, but he isn't going to stop once he graduates in June; in fact, he has launched a business called Clarity Menus and More, and plans on making menus while attending college. His mother, Martha Fessenden, said her son was born three months premature, and she was told he'd "never talk, walk, or read Braille. Now he's 18 years old and he's doing all the above and so much more."
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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
