Be My Eyes – Lend your eyes to the blind | Hacker News Reader

Be My Eyes – Lend your eyes to the blind

bemyeyes.org

827 pointskhebbie160 comments

Nice idea, but I think it would be better if it were commercial, with the blind user paying, the sighted helper getting paid, and the app developers getting a cut. The payment could be by the minute. I think the general public will be more inclined to treat blind people as equals if we demolish the notion that blind people require charity.

Addendum: Lest anyone think I'm talking out of my ass, here's a blog post from a blind programmer who previously had the idea of doing something like this as a business. Unfortunately, it looks like he abandoned that project, since the home page now redirects to something else.

https://thewordnerd.info/2014/04/01/perceptron-the-first-rea...

Actually, I haven't abandoned it--literally working on it this very minute, in fact. :)

The problem is that multi-platform video interchange is a hard problem. Very hard. SIP only gets you so far even with web RTC, then you hit issues where server X doesn't like delegating authentication to anything else, Y does but requires super-indepth knowledge of the protocol, and Z may or may not but it's got so many modules it's hard to tell. Then there's the issue of needing some degree of call control so connections can be terminated for using too much time, which the hosted SIP services I looked at don't seem to allow. And, unfortunately, the hardest problem of the launch list is the one I need to get right, meaning I've spent months looking for a good, low-cost, cross-platform (desktop, Android and IOS) video exchange solution and have only recently found something that may work. It's possible that I've just used bad Google keywords or something, but none of the legacy SIP servers seem to like being plugged into a web app as opposed to managing everything themselves.

So, yeah, definitely not abandoned, I've just spent way more time than I liked finding a possibly good media server, plus continuing to earn money so I can keep the lights on and pay the rent. :) Hoping for a launch in the next couple months, assuming my current path pays off.

BTW, how the hell do you accessibly (I.e. via the keyboard) click the button to submit comments here? :P I have to poke around on my touchscreen until I find it, then double-tap. Surely there's a better way?

Also, something else that bothers me a bit about lots of the comments in this thread:

It's nice that people want to keep things free and to avoid the influence that money might bring to a thing. But the unfortunate reality is that we live in a society that doesn't let me buy groceries, beer or housing with goodwill. Sure, help is a good thing, and I'm the last person who wants to live in a society where our interactions are commoditized. But there's a cost for the convenience of near-instantly beaming that help to your phone/desktop/smart glasses. Put simply, I'm just as much a consumer as are you, and I think that regarding services like these as something that should be given away for free is a big reason there's next to zero innovation in how I as a blind person interact with my world.

Put more practically, I've probably spent ~$100 on audio-only games in the course of my lifetime (would likely be more, I'm just not a huge gamer.) Additionally, I've purchased Twitter clients, book readers and other apps specifically designed to be highly accessible because their mainstream equivalents aren't, or their accessibility implementations are laughably bad (see Kindle for PC, which I'd rather crack Kindle content than use.) We're here, we're buying things, and while there's certainly a large segment of the community that will vocally complain if things aren't free, we're happy to fund new innovation for folks who can deliver something beyond another currency/color identifier or minor screen reader iteration.

There are various ways to segment customers to extract money from those who can afford it, while offering low-cost or free services to those who cannot.

We need companies like this to have high cash flow, so they can hire top developers and create jobs where an engineer's daily work goes directly to improve human quality of life.

I'd like it if this would force you to pay based on how long something was going to take. I want to install freenas in a virtual machine so I can test the web interface accessibility before spending the money on a server to run it. I'd gladly pay $10 or $15 to have someone walk me through the install by me pointing my phone at my laptop screen if that were possible but don't want to ask someone who's expecting to spend 30 seconds reading a label spend 30 minutes walking me through an OS install instead.

Off-topic, but what audio-only games can you recommend?

I don't know the answer to your question but it should be a required exercise for every web developer to use their website with a screen reader and a blindfold. It would change the way they/we build websites.

I would submit an issue to HN to fix their accessibility – there is no excuse (for HN) not to.

Edit: Sentence subject-ambiguity clarification.

I expect that using a screen reader and a blindfold would take some considerable time to get effective at, even for accessible sites.

As for the sites I am responsible for, I try to make them accessible by reading and applying the guidelines, but I do appreciate feedback from blind people on ways to improve it for them.

That would be stupid for most sites - only a small minority of customers are blind and it isn't worth changing the entire site for them (unless you are amazon or you get it for free by using standard HTML things like links, buttons, etc).

And before you scream ADA, that is a) nationalistic (not all web developers are in the US) b) usually something that can be worked around - e.g. put your phone number on the site as an alternative.

Accomodating people with disabilities is an ethical issue, not a numbers game.

> I don't know the answer to your question but it should be a required exercise for every web developer to use their website with a screen reader and a blindfold. It would change the way they/we build websites.

Really ? Are you going to ask every developer as well to try to use a website by binding their arms as well, to see how mutilated people feel about the navigation ?

There are good cases for adapting designs to make it usable to most people, and there are good cases as well where the people with disabilities need to have tools to access what's not made for them in the first place.

Ah yes, cross platform video. The bane of anyone who has ever worked with videoconferencing systems. If you're still working on it (ditto for the authors of Be My Eyes) it may be worth getting in touch with someone along the lines of Pexip[1] to see if they're interested in assisting with infrastructure and handling of media so that it's possible to focus on wrapping that is some beautiful UX for this use case.

[1] http://pexip.com/

For completeness sake, I'd like to note that the OP doesn't seem to be cross-platform.

Hmm, the reply button to submit this comment is just reachable with tab as it should be, so I don't see any issues there?

Have you looked at something like BigBlueButton? I recently used it to give a webinar. They don't have an HTML 5 client yet unfortunately, but they integrate some interesting things to provide video/audio over WebRTC and to their Flash client. I think it uses Freeswitch for the audio/video part.

If you nail the technical issues, you might find that lots of blindies are not that good videographers. You need a high quality stream and preferably a method to let the remote party control the camera zoom. I use "remote eyes" in various situations and had quite some issues focussing my camera in the beginning. I use USB camera glasses or a smartphone, usually just through a Skype connection.

Does anybody have any market data, at least or the US? E.g., are there enough visually impaired people to sustain such a service, e.g., for $20-50/month? Can Medicare/Medicaid cover part of the costs?

TIL blind people use smileys.

Blindness is unfortunately a nearly crushing disability economically. 74% of the blind are unemployed [1] (there is another figure you will occasionally also see of 13% unemployment for the blind, that's a US Government statistic that excludes anyone who is not considered in the list of potentially employed people).

Equally important for HN-type readers to know is that Braille literacy is highly correlated with employment among the blind, and rates of Braille literacy are falling rapidly in the US, from a peak of around 50% in the 1950's to more like 12% today [1].

Smart phone apps are great and important but from what I've read they don't seem to be having the impact on blind employment that Braille has had.

Hopefully someone here will know of a survey reporting measurable economic gains for the new generation of Braille-illiterate technologically assisted blind, thus far what I've heard anecdotally on that front has not been encouraging.

[1] http://www.nbp.org/ic/nbp/braille/needforbraille.html

The tools around Braille are expensive. Braille computer displays and typewriters are all in the thousands of dollars. Books are in the hundreds of dollars, and hard to obtain.

Screen readers, the computer replacement for Braille, are also stupidly expensive (one I looked up was $900 for the home edition).

I'm not blind, but my father had low vision and so I know a little about the experience. It infuriates me that authors have pressured Amazon into removing the audio text reading ability of the Kindle. Such small-minded greed is indefensible.

Most books exist as audio books.

You mean "a very small subset of all books exist in the more expensive form of an audio book". Just check the library closest to you: 10000s of books, 100s of audio books.

Wow, I would not have expected those low Braille literacy figures. For the UK, numbers seem to be similar. I couldn't find any for other European countries, but at least here in Germany Braille markings are very common, so I'd always thought that most blind can use them.

I think computers killed off Braille, particularly among the young. Both Windows (with the right software) and Mac OS X (straight out of the box) are surprisingly (it suprised me!) usable by blind people.

With speech output instead of Braille devices? Interesting.

> With speech output instead of Braille devices? Interesting.

Both. The one doesn't exclude the other. I'm a heavy user of text-to-speech at high rates to digest content easily, but prefer braille when coding or doing some work on a shell/terminal.

You'll see much more braille displays in some European countries because they get subsidized by health insurance or a government entity that provides assistive technology for the workplace. This workstation has a 88 cell braille display, which means it can display 88 braille characters at a time. That unit costs $10k or so, depending on market and EUR/USD rate etc, but to give you an idea of the price tag. I also have a mobile unit with 40 cells, I guess that one is about $6k or so.

The 12% figure refers to legally blind children, the majority (90%) of whom are partially sighted.

For someone who is able to read text at close distances with significant optical assistance, it is far more beneficial for them to learn a written language than to learn braille characters. Until recently, many legally blind US children (and their parents) had the choice to either learn braille or written English. Those who learned braille ended up severely disadvantaged because of the utter lack of braille information produced in our society, and the difficulty of using any screen-based technology.

For these kinds of services, the introduction of a payment can change supply and demand in very unexpected ways.

Example: There once was an experiment with blood donations, where a payment for the blood donation actually decreased the number of people who were willing to donate. Apparently, receiving a payment for an activity that seems charitable makes some people feel bad.

A similar effect might happen if Blind My Eyes introduced payments. (While this particular effect would reduce supply, this does not necessarily imply that the introduction of a payment would lead to a negative change in supply. It's just one factor.)

As a blind person, I find the idea that my borrowing someone's eyes is viewed as a charitable thing somewhat bothersome, particularly if I'm doing it to use my time more efficiently.

Put another way, sure I can wait 6 hours or so until a sightling happens to be around so I can read a letter, but how is me paying a few bucks for someone's time to do it now any different than you paying for Uber, Lyft, etc. instead of taking a bus?

Further, while I support this initiative, I have to wonder how sustainable it will be in the long run. I used to occasionally use Solona, a CAPTCHA-solving service that relied on volunteers. Unfortunately I can't seem to find it anymore (only searched briefly) and I recall many instances where volunteers weren't available. A marketplace that exchanges micropayments for these types of services, usable on a variety of platforms and with easy notifications for assistants, is something I've personally wanted for a very long time.

Disclosure: I'm working on such a thing, hoping to launch in 2-3 months.

It's not more charitable than contributing content to Wikipedia. By gamifying the service or otherwise rewarding those who lend their eyes in some non-monetary way, participating in the app is a form of entertainment that brings its own reward.

Contributions to Wikipedia are not time-sensitive, and the ability to load a Wikipedia article is not dependent on the availability of volunteering Wikipedia gnomes. Here, the availability of seeing volunteers at any given time is the limiting reagent, and the free market is one proposed solution. The Uber/Lyft/taxi analogy is that the availability of friends with cars and free time at any given time or place is the limiting reagent for getting free rides. The existence of paid services allows us to increase that availability by orders of magnitude, and hopefully the same would apply here.

Well, AFB would like to have a conversation with you.

http://www.afb.org/info/living-with-vision-loss/for-job-seek...

I'm all for empowering people but I doubt that given the current state of things, especially blind and visually impaired employment rate, this would be successful if it were for-profit.

If successful as a non-profit this projects can

- raise awareness

- break isolation

- practically improve lives

- push society forward (helping solve employment?)

- make everybody's life much better

I really mean it regarding "empowerment". I've worked with NGOs on remote locations and I'm all too aware of their derives but in this case I think your point makes no sense.

Please do contact us at info@bemyeyes.org

I'd feel pretty cheeky helping a blind person if I was doing it just to get paid for it.

Similarly, I wouldn't help an old lady cross the street then ask for a pound.

I think at that point you wouldn't be "crowdsourcing" your labor anymore. It'd be like a telecommunications relay service[1], where the operators are properly trained employees.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_relay_servic...

Yep it's called micro volunteering :-)

What if there was a setting: "I only provide service for free" / "I accept payments for my service" in your profile?

Such a setting could even be on a per-case basis. Imagine if you helped someone for a good part of a day, and they were ready to return the favor in cash, and you were given the choice to accept or decline it.

Really? Equals? Don't require charity? They CAN'T SEE. Even if they can somehow manage to do "everything" a normal person can do, they can't do it with the same speed.

Every blind person is 100% totally self-sufficient and able to hold down a steady job that pays well enough to take care of all their needs? Job hunting is hard enough when you can see!

Imagine, a world where the government and employers didn't provide any extra help for the blind, and the blind didn't have families to lean on.

What the hell are you actually talking about?

"If we took wheelchairs away from crippled people, maybe the general public will be more inclined to treat them as equals and demolish the notion that cripples require the assistance of wheelchairs"

I'd suggest (almost) exactly the opposite, actually...

Charge $5/mo to be a 'helper' and keep it free for blind users. I suspect there are enough folks out there who would be happy to pay $5 for the opportunity to help others (maybe I'm too much of an optimist though... who knows...)

That way you cover costs, and filter out a lot of potential trolls.

Paying someone to be a middleman on my volunteer charity work feels pretty gross.

Why? They are enabling you to have opportunities to help people that you would not otherwise have. I would consider that a service worth paying for (and I assume I'm not alone...)

It feels like being taken advantage of. It's taking the worst part of crowdsourcing, which is that the majority of the gains are concentrated in a few people while many people contribute to success, but receive a pittance, and making it even worse.

I'm not convinced that the raw economic incentives work out, either. I have tons of opportunities to help people. Supply of people who need help greatly exceeds my ability to provide it. I can't imagine paying for the privilege.

If they are providing a valuable service, this will lead to competition and more vendors who want to help you provide your charity more easily/efficiently/augmented/whatever.

If they are not providing a valuable service, they will go out of business.

I think this is a good idea. The subscription could potentially be done similarly to Humble Bundle where a decent percentage could be ring fenced for charitable/non-profit organisations. In this case you'd expect it to go to organisations helping the bodily impaired.

Upvoted, though I don't like that idea. People tend to treat differently things they do for money and things they do for non-monetary rewards. In this particular case, I'm not sure which version would be better for the blind, but I think I'd prefer to help for free.

I'm interested in further discussion. Input from actual blind people would be really helpful here.

Well, for what it's worth, I'm legally blind (I have enough sight to read a computer screen up close, but not enough to drive). And I have totally blind friends who like the idea of a paid service like this. (I personally know the guy whose blog post I referenced in the addendum to my first post.)

Thanks for your input. As I wrote, I'm mainly worried about the tendency for pro-bono systems to get corrupted when you introduce money into them.

BTW. How big payments you had in mind?

If blind are willing to pay and volunteers are willing to help for free, then all the money can be spent on innovation. Sound like a perfect business to me, as long as the volunteer return rate is good.

Taptapsee[1] is a similar app that is commercial. Its a bit more limited / streamlined, in that it only sends one picture and one textual description instead of doing a video chat, but it does work really well. I agree that making it a commercial service can be a positive thing, because it makes a blind user not feel any guilt over using the service excessively. On the other the financial situations of people with disabilities are quite different in different countries, so my perspective here is limited.

[1] http://www.taptapseeapp.com

Would the creator(s) of Be My Eyes pitch in here and share their view of non-profit vs. for-profit? For instance, our company, Robin Labs, develops voice-driven solutions, technology that should be almost perfect for the visually impaired. We are willing to design a dedicated product that is just the right voice assistant for the blind if we can simply break even. We want to help, but cannot self-fund it entirely.

It would be interesting to use something like bitcoin for social capital -- literally a favor bank.

My first thought was the point that saalaa is making in a sibling comment, but I'm also thinking there should be a way for users to either go for a volunteer, or have mechanical turk options when you REALLY need to see something and you would pay for it.

I like the idea of helping people for free (as do many people in the thread). But I wonder quality of assistance would be better if people were getting paid. And I wonder if the app would reach more people if it were for profit.

The blind people are already outnumbered by the sighted, pretty much 1:10. Turns out blind people don't use phones with touch screens.

#shithnsays

"Nice idea, but I think it would be better if it were commercial, with the blind user paying, the sighted helper getting paid, and the app developers getting a cut. The payment could be by the minute."

What makes you think your opinion on this matters? That sounds inflammatory but it's a bit pompous to look at an idea and say, "nice, but you should make people pay for it."

Oddly relevant - a This American Life episode recently explored whether cultural expectations of blind individuals' abilities have been detrimental[1].

1. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/544/b...

That is the first thought I had. The expectation here is that the blind need help, which may not be the case. The interesting thing to me was that the blind can "see" through echo location. Very cool stuff.

SOME blind people can see using echo location. From what I understand, children can learn faster in detecting objects with sound vs someone much older where it may take much longer. There is a pretty good Wiki on it that explains more and includes some people from the show[1].

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_echolocation

There are also various auditory vision substitution systems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_substitution#Auditory_v...). The vOICe creators claim that blind individuals can achieve the equivalent 20/250 vision with a week of training (http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/dec/07/voice-soundsc...).

20/250 vision is... really good. Able to use a full 80x24 terminal with ease. Able to drive as long as you're not too picky about legality or reading signs. Able to read facial expressions in a conversation. I'm very curious about the details of 'equivalent'.

Wow, yeah. I'm 20/400ish without my contacts in (nearsighted, -3.75/-4.0, plus some mild astigmatism), and while I couldn't drive a vehicle like that (or rather, wouldn't - I could probably stay in the lane okay during the day, but wouldn't be able to read any signs, and after dark the whole experience would be terrifying), I can certainly interact fine with others, read facial expressions as long as a person isn't on the complete other side of the room, can easily navigate unfamiliar rooms, and use a book or a screen as long as I hold it within a foot of my face.

With nearsightedness, you can have nearly normal vision 1 foot away even if you have much worse vision 20 feet away. With this system I suspect you can see things better when they're closer just because they encompass more of the visual field, but you probably can't see something 1 foot away nearly as well as a myopic person with 20/250 vision.

On the other hand, you might still be able to read. The vOICe people published a paper (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0896627312...) that shows that regions of the brain that are activated by letters/words in normal individuals and by Braille reading in the blind are activated by vOICe after training.

It's limited to 1 fps though. However I'm very impressed this is possible. I had a similar idea recently, and had no idea it had already been done or worked so well.

Presumably only those blind people who need help would use the app, no?

My only question is how do you handle trolls, idiots, abuse etc?

What happens if for example 4chan decides to 'raid' your app and direct blind people into unfortunate situations. I must admit it's a very low act but that's my only real thought about this.

If abuse wasn't a possibility I think the app is 100% amazing.

I imagine they'd want to verify the identity of "helpers" through the same means that Paypal does: through bank account (not credit card) verification.

We do have abuse handling

Not only intentional abuse, but what about lag? Especially when say, crossing the road!

I will only assume that crossing the road is not a huge problem for blind people. I am sure most know how to do it safely, traffic light sounds or simply asking someone to help. I doubt anyone would rely on internet/videochat for something as high precision as that.

I don't know anyone blind, so I might be wrong on some part(s).

Crossing the road is definitely stretching it! We are adapting the website to reflect that. We are already getting a lot of feedback with interesting use cases – it's is going to be really interesting to see what the community that is building around By My Eyes will come up with!

How does it work? I think trust is a huge factor with this sort of thing, so you have to be transparent about how you'd prevent, say, random asshats potentially putting people in real danger.

We are indeed very transparent: hub.com/bemyeyes/bemyeyes-server

I think we use http://github.com/bemyeyes/bemyeyes-server :)

This also was my first thought, and my second thought was to solve it through redundancy.

Not exactly abuse, but I think this app might be a way for non-blind people to get to know some random potentially nice person. Sort of like chat roulette but without the dicks.

What the industry needs is OPEN training data for image and voice recognition, which can be annotated by human volunteers and used to improve new algos. This data can be hosted by archive.org under a permissive license.

For example, there is a commercial service in the "visual search" space which has been around for a few years, which uses a combination of algos and human employees. It is available as an API and app (8 cents per picture, or $10 per month unlimited).

"Besides CamFind, the Image Searcher, Inc. team also created TapTapSee, which is a similar app for the blind and visually impaired. It uses image recognition technology with photos taken on your smartphone and then a voice actually speaks the results. This earned the team an Access Award just one week ago from the American Foundation for the Blind", http://www.builtinla.com/blog/camfind-brings-visual-search-y...

An AFB review from 2013 (at that time the app was free), http://www.afb.org/afbpress/pub.asp?DocID=aw140704

How much faster could this research area have moved if the collected data was open? What if Facebook/Instagram decided to contribute in some manner, given their large database of photos and tags?

I find the thought of communicating directly with someone a bit anxiety-inducing, but I would really love to volunteer for something like this.

I would be happy to transcribe a letter, or product expiry date so that I could be read back to the user with text-to-speech in real-time.

I suspect that I'm in the minority and this is likely a non-issue.

That's actually an interesting bit of feedback. Thanks. I'm using SIP/web RTC for my for-profit version of this and had considered adding text chat, but I couldn't come up with a good use case so left it out. It'd probably also be useful when the text of something is important and you'd like a record after the call ended. I'll add that to the features list.

Yeah, I was about to use the Be My Eyes app to help and as soon as I realized I'd have to actually have a video/audio chat with a person, I admittedly chickened-out.

That is very interesting feedback. I am a developer from Be My Eyes. What could be done to make it less intimidating?

I have the same fears. Downloaded the app, and once I realized that I needed to make an account, in addition to my fear, I balked out. Or maybe I'm just lazy..

I'm in the same boat. I'd be more likely to help if it wasn't real-time (but still quick enough to be helpful).

vizWiz is an alternative, which is not real time

From the little I talked with blind people, I think this could be a great solution for shopping. People I talked with said that crossing streets or moving around ain't big problem for them, but one of their biggest pain points are grocery stores. More and more, Mom&Pop stores are replaced by network supermarkets, in which you need to search for the product yourself instead of asking for it, and employees are often not prepared/willing to help a blind customer. This app could help a lot here.

Are there any legal consequences if a blind person is helped crossing the street and gets hit by a car?

Yeah, I saw that and just thought hell no. I'm partially sighted & there's no a chance I'd let someone guide me across a road via video chat on a 3G connection. I'd go as far as saying that's quite an irresponsible use to suggest on your home page.

It wouldn't be any different than the passenger in your car telling you, like "clear right". Any resulting accident is still the driver's fault afaik.

I think it's much different from a legal standpoint. First and foremost, the driver is assumed to be fully valid and thus in no need of a blind trust (no pun intended).

there isn't network delay when your passenger tells you its "clear right"

Yes; also, if the person is in the car, they're risking their own life -- not so if they're hundreds of miles away.

Not to mention the vastly better field of view and detail. Neither of which translate very well through a phone camera.

I have heard that if you were to, say, wave someone through at a stop sign and they got in an accident you could be held liable.

If only there was an Android version I'd be on it right now. In fact I think it would actually be quite an enjoyable past time answering requests, especially for lonely people.

Think about how interesting it would be to help out a complete stranger from anywhere in the world. I think it would become quite addicting.

Not only lonely. Just bored.

I also hope for a release on Android soon.

I am part of the team who created the app and api.

Many blind users use the voice over feature built into ios as @rgoodwintx mentioned.

One problem that I see (you guys might already address this) but if I'm a helper and I get a call from a blind person and I have just a couple minutes to help but the blind person needs 10 minutes of help it would be inefficient to connect me with them. One way to solve this would be for the blind to select a time range of how much help they need (1 minute, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, etc...) and then when it calls the helper it will show how much help is needed, so they can either decline or go into the call knowing how long they will be busy for.

Also you may be able to introduce pricing in this way, where anything under 5 minutes is free, but over 5 minutes you charge however much per minute and then split the cost with the helper.

We didn't think about that but will take it into consideration. The app will probably stay free as that is the whole base of this. But the expected timespan is very usable. Thank you.

Great undertaking, guys! I am from Robin Labs, we create voice assistants and would like to build one for the blind (Siri-style, but one that is really eyes-free). To do that, we need somebody who understands the target audience and their use cases better than we do. Maybe we could team up and make a difference. If that sounds interesting, please ping me at ilya AT robinlabs DOT com.

We could potentially build your API into the Assistant for cases where the machine cannot help - them the user would summon a human.

What made you choose iOS first over Android? (Was it an arbitrary choice or one driven by data that more iOS users would be on board with this sort of project than Android users? Maybe something simpler like the developers had more iOS experience?)

This is my lack of experience, but how does a blind person launch the app and find the correct button to push? I have toyed around with the Accessibility Features on the iPhone, is there a mode that will speak out what you are tapping on?

VoiceOver, among other features I believe: https://www.apple.com/accessibility/ios/voiceover/

Yep. We have optimised quite a lot for VoiceOver. The graphical part of the UI is quite boring for the blind :)

You should try VoiceOver and the gestures that come with it, it's mind blowing how well it works. I've found plenty of usability improvements that are really easy to make so that VoiceOver works flawlessly in apps I've worked on.

Let me know if you find any ways to improve Be My Eyes related to Voice Over. Or help out here https://github.com/bemyeyes/bemyeyes-ios!

A blind guy I met at a conference showed me something very cool with voiceover, try voiceover in the camera app then point the camera at some people.

With Siri you can just press the home button for 2 seconds and say: "Open Be My Eyes" and it will open it up for you.

Siri "Launch the X app"? I gather the rest of the UI can be used with gestures. See a user flicking sideways in the video.

Maybe they are using Siri to launch apps

Could someone who has used the app tell us about the real-life experience please?

Well I have used the app as both blind and sighted. A blind person simply presses a button which sends requests to a helper. If the helper does not have time, the api sends a request to another helper. When a helper takes the call, he/she gets a video and audio stream from the blind persons phone. The blind person gets an audio stream from the sighted person.

A conversion about the problem to be solved can now take place. Whenever the blind or sighted person wishes to disconnect, they press a button and the call is finished.

Is that what you were asking for?

Yes, thank you. I was also wondering what kind of problems this app is solving. I'm not visually impaired so I'm probably not good at imagining real-world scenarios where this app can be useful. It sounds like a great idea and very promising.

Well: "Does my socks match" "Is this milk too old" "which of the three cans in front of me is the coconut milk" Only the imagination of the users sets the limit...

I'm assuming (maybe wrongly and naively) that those are already solved problems. I'm assuming a visually impaired person already has his/her routines to avoid those problems. That's why I wanted to hear from the users of the app. For example, a volunteer who helped someone.

Here's an example from real life (in person, not via this app).

I have a buddy who is blind. In the US, paper currency is all the same size and shape, so it's impossible to distinguish them by feel alone. He uses a system of folds to remember which bill is which, but if he drops one, or the cashier doesn't tell him what the denominations are, etc..., he ends up not know which bill is which. Occasionally that means he has to ask someone, despite having a 'routine' that is generally very effective.

This iOS currency recognition app is accurate and easy to use. If only more visual recognition apps were this easy, or there was an open-source recognizer library for this functionality:

http://www.looktel.com/recognizer

There are scanners that a blind person can keep in their pocket or on a keychain that will scan currency and speak the denomination.

http://www.orbitresearch.com/ibill_details.php

iBill® Talking Banknote Identifier, $119 with free shipping.

Well I have helped someone, find the right CD. The examples mentioned are all from usages of the app.

The idea for the app came from Hans Jørgen Wiberg who himself has tunnel vision. He worked for the danish blind society, where he taught blind people to cook. One thing he often heard was "If only I could have a pair of eyes a few minutes a day..." He also knew of blind people who used facetime to connect to their loved ones. But the good thing about this concept is that you just say "Thank you" and disconnect and you are done with it, you don't owe someone a favour.

Reminds me of http://pornfortheblind.org/ (nsfw) which is a service where people watch and narrate videos for blind people.

After listening to the latest This American Life the first thing that occurs to me is though the intentions of this are good and their are some good uses for it this might have unintended consequences

The EP of This American Life is that basically with a little practice most blind people can learn to see with echolocation. Yes I know it sounds incredible but listen to the episode. The TL;DL version would be

(1) blind people can learn to echolocate

(2) MRI scans prove they are actually seeing, no colors but shapes

(3) People that could see but then went blind and learned to echolocate confirm they can see.

(4) The fact that most people think blind people can't do anything and need and then offer so much help prevents most blind people from learning to echolocate and start seeing.

don't shoot the messenger.

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/544/b...

It might be nice if your SO/parent/etc could get first priority, and then outsource if they are not available. That way couples could use the app for their own convenience too.

I watched Charlie Brooker's new Black Mirror episode 'White Christmas' recently, and it deals with technology not entirely dissimilar to this. Well worth a watch.

There's a similar market to connect students with tutors, e.g. "I'm stuck on this physics homework problem, can you help me right now?"

Examples:

http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/blog/2014/12/15/quickhelp...

http://www.astutetutoring.com/

The entire project is Open Source – check it out on http://github.com/bemyeyes/ !

Why would a blind person carry a touch screen phone??

Both iOS and Android now have pretty good accessibility features for the blind. I think iOS is still slightly ahead though. Basically the phone reads out the button or action when you put your finger over it and you have to double tap to click. When you go to a new screen, it reads out the contents.

You can try it yourself if you have an iOS or Android phone by enabling the feature. But I've met blind people who use their touch screen smart phones every day.

It's not like smartphones don't have accessibility features (text-to-speech and similar).

Great application of remote crowdsourced guidance.

Of course the end game is to allow remote "workers" to take control of appliances in your home to do certain tasks that aren't easy to automate yet, ie clear the dinner table, wash the dishes, clean up after the dog, etc.

Another lucrative application would be remote operation of heavy machinery. Imagine road work with no "Men at Work" signs.

I have installed the app on my iPhone 6, tried to use my Facebook account (but I prefer OAuth to setting up a Facebook account on my device), so I have created an account (through email address) and now the application just crashes every time I launch it.

I have uninstalled it and logged in again, but the crash loop is coming back.

Otherwise your concept is great, but the app needs improvements from here.

Can you please send an email to info@bemyeyes.org with the details, as we are very interested in fixing this issue

Looks like a novel idea! I'm wondering what's the purpose of giving "points" to the helpers? I can't find anywhere in the website mentioning the points' purpose.

It's a non-profit/charity, and (I think) people understand they won't get anything in return (other than good feeling), what's with the points? (pure curiosity)

Gamification. "Internet points" have a way to boost one's self-esteem while not perverting as much as monetary rewards do. Even though I totally want to help for free, I'd personally like to look every now and then and see how many people I've helped over time, just to boost my feelings of self-worth.

It's also a way to establish trust between the blind and the volunteers. I haven't used the app but I imagine the blind can somehow (via voice?) specify a certain threshold of "points". Otherwise, there might be some uncool people out there doing uncool things.

The points is just a fun gamification thing. Trying to make people share and use the app.

Curious: a couple of the images of "blind" eyes show eyes with no pupils. Forgive my ignorance, but is this common among blind people, or is it a Photoshopism? If a Photoshopism, then is it wise for a website offering services for the blind to misrepresent the physiology of blindness?

They are all pictures of actual blind people. There are no "Photoshopism" involved other than the usual enhancing brightness or contrast etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cataract

This would not work in Brazil, at least currently, where our 3G/4G are laughable... But it's a good start. The machine learning applicability could be awesome. Maybe one day we can have a smartphone guiding the blind without the need for an actual human to be on the other side.

Sounds like a prime candidate for Amazon's Mechanical Turks. Vet & train a core group, and pay them to narrate pictures/video. Not hard work, not high pay, but (as a friend has found) there are competent people willing to do such work for humble pay.

Yet another iPhone-only application. I guess I won't be helping blind people as an Android peasant ;)

Great concept, though, and it being FOSS is a huge plus in my book (and will probably help with developing more applications around this for non-iOS platforms).

Great idea guys, this will benefit the visual impairment community greatly :). I had a similar idea several years ago but for the web. Where you could use a sighted person's eyes to navigate a webpage.

I just downloaded it, and I'm stuck at the "please enable the following to fully join the Be My Eyes network". I approved all the permissions. Nothing's happening.

iOS 8.something on an iPhone5.

iOS 7 here, had same problem.

just switch between apps, it goes normal but there's no direct transition.

Now that's one of those ideas that are so ingenious that it's actually giving me chills. Also, it's always great when IT improves people health condition.

Watch out for 4chan. They posted a bunch of strobing GIFs in a epilepsy forum a while back. I wouldn't put it past them to find exploiting this app hilarious...

Currently we have builtin abuse reports in the app, if either end of a call thinks something is odd. Hopefully we can catch abuse through this mechanism.

Please let us know if you hear about anything like this in relation to Be My Eyes – sounds horrible.

This seems amazing and world changing. Would love to see more apps like this. Downloading now...

Great idea, very pleased to see app with this passion to help and change. Great work

Crossing the street? Really??

Am I the only person that saw this app and immediately thought of google glass?

Mostly sighted users on this app.. when will I be able to see for someone?

Now my eyes are watering. Good job on the introduction video.

Any chance of an Android version?

Edit: Sorry, should have looked at the FAQ.

Thanks, really, for showing hope for humanity.

Does the app keep in mind that it's nearly impossible for blind people to operate a smartphone? There's no keyboard or braille on such a device.

The iPhone has VoiceOver, and there are bluetooth Braille keyboards/displays for typing.

This page goes into a bit more detail: https://andreashead.wikispaces.com/How+Do+Blind+People+Use+a...

The small heading "Blind Requests Assistance" should probably be rephrased. You don't wanna use a disability as a noun like that.

Ok...that is just cool.

Oh what happens if a serial killer uses it to lure blind people in?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com