Barista uses sign language to take deaf customers’ orders — VIDEO
Placing an order through the drive-thru can be challenging and frustrating task for anyone. We probably all have a story to tell about a time we tried to place an order and it was either too windy or there was just a bad connection, leaving the employee on the other end cutting in and out.
However, have you ever considered how much more difficult this task would be for someone who is deaf? According to the Huffington Post, Starbucks has recognized this problem and added two-way cameras to some of their ordering kiosks.
A video posted on Facebook by 28-year-old Rebecca King of St. Augustine, Florida, demonstrates how convenient these new video screens are for members of the deaf community.
In the footage you hear a woman's voice emit through the intercom saying, "Hi, welcome to Starbucks. What can we get started for you today?"
After King remains silent, a Starbucks barista appears via a monitor on the ordering kiosk a few moments later.
Using sign language, King begins to communicate with the woman and to her surprise, the barista uses sign language to converse with her.
The barista in the video is Katie Wyble, a 22-year-old college student who has "had a passion for sign language since [she] first saw a teacher use it in preschool," she told Action News Jax.
Wyble, who began studying American Sign Language in high school, says she is thrilled the video has been shared so widely on social media.
"I think more people need to know about what we’re doing because it moves customer service to a whole new level. I hope it helps make more people aware of what they can to do serve others in their communities," she said.
King, who first met Wyble on Starbucks' video screen the previous day, was so excited and thrilled about her experience that she returned the following day to document it with her camera.
"It is a big deal to [the] deaf community that Starbucks has one now. We all want to have that at every drive-thru in the world," she said.
Although it is unclear how many Starbucks drive-thru kiosks are outfitted with the two-way video feature, the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind is located in St. Augustine, which is home to a large deaf community.
Starbucks isn't the first restaurant chain to make drive-thru ordering easier for deaf customers.
In 2010, Culver's, a Midwest fast-food chain, made headlines by becoming the first fast-food company to install an accessibility system for deaf customers, called OrderAssist, at some of its drive-thrus.
More recently, Subway installed touch-screen ordering kiosks at a handful of outlets. Although the company said the technology would make drive-thru ordering "faster and more accurate," a touch-screen system would be helpful to deaf customers.
