Be My Eyes Hits the 1M Volunteer Mark | Hacker News Reader

Be My Eyes Hits the 1M Volunteer Mark

globalaccessibilitynews.com

95 pointswalterbell17 comments

I've been a volunteer for a couple of years now. It's so rare to get the ping for volunteers (maybe once every few months?) and you really have to be very quick to accept the call before another volunteer does, but when you're able to connect and help it's such an rush of joy. The project such a simple, elegant application of smartphones and real-time crowdsourcing.

There is also a paid service that does similar to this, except the assistance is provided by trained agents. I have the service and have found it to be invaluable in the few times I've actually needed to use it. I still have some vision, so it actually makes it harder to decide to use the service.

The paid service is http://aira.io. I'm glad BME exists too though, as there are a lot of blind people that currently can't afford Aira. The unemployment rate for blind people is something like a staggering 70%.

These days I'm very cynical of the human race, but stories like this create a pinprick of light in the darkness.

Cheer up! Take a break from the news, read Factfulness by Hans Rosling and realise it's not all so bad.

I recently signed up as a volunteer after listing to this podcast: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/be-my-eyes-mobile-micro-...

Interesting episode that touches on things like their monetizations strategy, unexpected use cases etc. Definitely worth a listen.

I recently heard of BME from a blind person. He doesn't need it often because he's usually with someone, but he said it worked very well. This was a good reminder as I forgot to sign up after he told me. I didn't know it was so widely used!

Seems to be 'HackerNews'-ed currently. Still available, in the meantime, via the Wayback Machine: http://web.archive.org/web/20181021030134/globalaccessibilit...

Very inspiring. Why don't someone attempt utilizing all ML advances in driving/OCR to make this work even when offline? This could pre-eliminate lot of cases.

It's not offline, but the Microsoft Seeing AI app for iOS uses ML to cover a lot of basic use cases like recognizing text, products, currency, describing scenes, etc: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/seeing-ai

Anirudh Koul, the Seeing AI founder, also recently left Microsoft to go work at Aira.io: https://aira.io/anirudh-koul-joins-aira-as-head-of-artificia...

Aira is trying to integrate this kind of technology into smart glasses for the blind.

There indeed is a data set for this purpose. The data is drawn from the VizWiz app, which came out in 2010.

http://vizwiz.org/data/

Don't underestimate the importance of human-to-human contact. Reminding a blind person that people do care and what can be a very lonely world for those who cannot see!

Ever thought about how a blind person strikes up a conversation with a stranger whose body language or eye contact cannot be read?

That doesn't really mean less would be in contact, but has chance to increase number of available volunteers, reducing respond time of the call. I care because I could be blind one day and use it everyday.

The idea behind the app is great, and I do use it occasionally. All of the volunteers I have spoken to have been very helpful. The main problem is video quality, and the fact that you can't just send the volunteer a clear photo to look at. It must be extremely frustrating to read something on a shaky blurry video call.

I'm a member since 2015 but the cynic in me says the service's success is due to its low effort/feel-good ratio...

BME is amazing - are there other apps/services I can register for like BME as an able bodied person?

Given the impact of it and the reaction of visually impaired people, it's a great mark to reach

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