[ID: link to Ruby Tandoh's Instagram post about her cookbook 'Cook As You Are', with an illustration from the book showing a brown-skinned person with a walking stick cooking on the hob, with various foodstuffs on the countertop around them)
Ruby Tandoh (of Great British Bake Off fame) has written a cookbook which has several features for accessibility, including:
- breaking things down into manageable steps
- lots of substitutions (for making a recipe low-prep, vegan/vegetarian, or in case you haven't got particular ingredients in the house) and how these will affect the dish
- a dedicated low-prep section for if you're low on time or energy, especially if you're disabled or chronically ill
- a reference chart to guide you to recipes that suit your needs
- an easy-read version if you struggle with reading, attention or complex instructions
- an ebook version optimised for screen readers, with alt text image descriptions so you can still benefit from the beautiful illustrations (they're probably a lot better than my ID above!)
- speaking of illustrations, the book is also beautifully illustrated, rather than being accompanied by professional-look photos, so that users aren't intimidated/disappointed about their home-cooked food not matching up to the glossy professional food photography of most cookbooks (personally I can actually find photos quite useful in knowing what the recipe is supposed to look like, but I still think it's a good feature)
This isn't an ad lol but I think it could be really useful for people following this blog because it does a lot of the stuff I set out to do with this blog (and some more besides). Ruby's post goes into more detail about these accessibility features and more, if you follow the Instagram link.
Also, here's the link for various purchase options (it comes out on 7th October in the UK and Autumn 2022 in the US, there's also an option for worldwide shipping) if you like the sound of it and don't want to go searching on Instagram or Google to find it:
Cook As You Are (out Oct 7th in the UK; US date TBA!)
