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Comment by mwcampbell | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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?

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 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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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."

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