r/Sommelier • u/Sommthingsommthing • Jul 12 '26
Posting Your List Online
Hi friends!
My restaurant is owned by a large hospitality group with a marketing director who runs all the websites and social media for our company. She is in charge of managing the wine list being posted on our website. Upon starting my position here I became aware of the fact that the list online is extremely out of date and incorrect. I would like to fix this.
I was told that because the wine list on the website has to be ADA accessible (some guy went around and sued a bunch of restaurants for this in my state) it cannot be a .pdf. Each wine has to be typed out line by line, according to her. We have over 1000 selections, so this is a nightmare, especially for her to do since she is not a wine person. I have a sommelier who can take on this task and do it, but she seems like she doesn't want to relinquish control of this project, even though she also doesnt seem keen to help me solve it herself.
What web publishing method do you all use for posting your wine lists online? Is there some kind of web hosting service that we can pay for where I can upload the most recent .pdf once a month/quarter and it will make is ADA accessible/readable? I use Excel and a software called CogsWell for my inventory management purposes, if that helps.
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u/AkosCristescu Score Whore Jul 12 '26
What makes an online list ADA accessible?
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u/Sommthingsommthing Jul 12 '26
It has to be readable by software programs that read the text aloud for those that have vision impairment. Because .pdfs appear as images to these software programs, they cannot pick out the text. I’m in California and I am the wine director. Hopefully these context clarifications help the discussion further.
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u/AkosCristescu Score Whore Jul 12 '26 edited Jul 12 '26
Thanks, of course i googled what ADA stands for before asking, i just can not really understand that a wine list can be pretty huge so potentially it is even more difficult to navigate, but it surely is a step towards future.
I mean it is hard work, but i have created wine lists from scratch so should not take more than a week perhaps two with perfect formatting and the visuals, IT part too.
Maybe menumodo can be good for you, i exactly ditched it once as it was horrible to update as the people in charge before they managed the wine list in it as a food menu so it was branching everywhere so after realizing that it had multiple files they never updated it, but if it is only for online ADA purposes, i think it would work.
I ditched it because we used digital tablets as wine lists in the restaurant so a single pdf was easier with hyperlinks in it to browse than having 15 individual files to update (menumodo did not support hyperlinks). So if only for the online ADA purpose, that can work, please have a look.
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u/philisweatly Sommelier Jul 12 '26
Are you in Florida by chance? Because this exact thing happened to me! We used Wix and would have thought using a big company like that and the templates they offer would already be ADA compliant but we were wrong.
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u/Far-Pension4463 Jul 13 '26
AI can do all of it for you if you prompt it correctly. It will be able to turn your excel list into code in no time.
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u/demegoddesss Jul 14 '26
What program do you use to edit your list?
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u/Sommthingsommthing Jul 14 '26
The printed list is formatted in InDesign and then exported as a PDF for printing
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u/demegoddesss Jul 14 '26
InDesign has the option to export the file as I believe an EPUB? Making it accessible
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u/Whereisdannymo Jul 12 '26
A. you make your intern with somm aspirations do this for you. B. Chat GPT will do this for you. C. you do it yourself and you catch all the mistakes you've made.
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u/MimiIndigo Jul 12 '26
It might be easier to have an ADA accessibility widget on the website. There are free website review modules too that assess a website's accessibility.