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@staringispolite An interesting position - one that I might not be entirely equipped to debate. Hans Jørgen Wiberg, the founder of Be My Eyes, is a leading figure in the danish blind society (and is visually impaired himself). He was asked about this on TV and his response was that an app like this isn't a substitute for real human contact. He said "I still expect blind people to ask their neighbor for help from time to time". His angle was more that instead of asking the same group of people repeatedly everyday, you could branch out and get a more diverse pool of help. This would make you more likely to 'borrow' a set of eyes in situations you might not have before, enabling you to do things that necessarily doesn't involve asking your spouse, friends or family about. Anecdotally I've seen this first hand and to me it makes sense. I don't think something like this will hurt the independence of blind people or make them too reliant. I think it'll empower them to do more without taxing existing relationships.
@flarup I think the two approaches can co-exist actually, I had just heard about the above "movement" so I was very curious to get your thoughts. They focus more on independence from *anyone* not just friend groups. They learn to sense the environment with canes, listening (some even echolocation!) passing vision tests with similar fidelity to a sighted person's peripheral vision. So their position (which I may be butchering here) was that a lot of help actually hinders.
But I thought the example of "does this picture of me look good" was fantastic. The milk was a bit silly (if it's bad, it'll smell bad) but no amount of this research purports to let blind people read screens. So there will always be specific instances where this tech can fit.
I just heard a radio show on this, so the timing is serendipitous. I think you may enjoy it (and I'd love to know what you think, working in the space) http://www.thisamericanlife.org/...
This is one of the most impressive apps I've seen!
Help blind people see through video chats. This is a great example of micro-volunteering and the power of apps to actually improve people's live in meaningful ways.
Great work from the non-profit Be My Eyes in collaboration with the guys at Robocat apps (@flarup @williwu and team).
@farup and team love the concept! Can you provide some background how the concept came to be? What's the biggest product challenge you guys are facing?
What a great idea and noble cause. @flarup great job.
Is it easy for a blind person to sign up for this? Is it assumed someone will help them through registration?
What a great app. I actually had an experience where a sight impaired person asked me to help them get money from a Cash point/ATM. My thought was this is just one interaction of so many the person has where they have to trust complete strangers to help. Awesome idea.
This is such a wonderful idea - I really commend @flarup and the rest of the team on developing a truly philanthropic app. I'm downloading it now - hopefully I'll be able to help some people out!
I had a good friend in college that was blind and I got used to helping him around campus or with issues he couldn't navigate himself. I know this is going to be extremely useful to him and others. Well done.
Beautiful project and excellent implementation @flarup / it reminds me of http://www.eyewriter.org/, both expression of a human-centered technology that fosters social innovation.
Question: will the app be available in more languages?
@robertoscaccia Thanks! We're definitely going to introduce more languages. You can help out with localizations here https://crowdin.com/project/bemy...
It takes quite a bit for me to just go "wow" these days. But WOW, this is a truly brilliant use of technology, and the app looks really well polished too! I have family that work for The Blind Foundation here in New Zealand and I can't wait to show them and see what they think.
As a business model idea to fund the project, have you considered partnering with various foundations for the blind to offer private/local help rather than just crowdsourced help? I can imagine - particularly for older people - the idea of getting a complete stranger might be a little overwhelming. It might save some foundations money that they would have to have otherwise spent travelling to visit/help people in person, if they could help them via something like this? That and it may be able to help them support a lot more people on limited budgets!
This is absolutely fantastic, and something that actually deserves funding and attention.
I believe I've referenced my blog post on this topic before but I'm particularly interested in technology powered by people and its ability to inspire more empathy. Products like Kindly (cc @jordanwalker), Jelly (cc @biz @jazzychad), and recent hunt, Cloe[1], are good examples of this.
@flarup - what's the backstory to Be My Eyes? Of all the things you could do, why build this?
[1] Yesterday we recorded a podcast with @hildebrandchase, one of the founders of Cloe. We'll publish soon.
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