Be My Eyes

See Be My Eyes on www.bemyeyes.com

Be My Eyes is a mobile app which let’s blind people get help work with their surroundings from a large body of sighted volunteers via a video call. Given that there are 700,000 blind people v. 7,000,000 volunteers, the blind people are guaranteed to always have someone ready to help, though it means that volunteers don’t get much to do.

Heck, since joining last year, I can list out every volunteer call I’ve accepted where I

• sorted laundry,
• identified a t-shirt’s color,
• tried to configure Cortana only to find it depracated,
• set up a mic for a streaming setup,
• tried to help someone set up Galaxy Buds, and
• tried to help someone submit an online form that wasn’t working because of a Captcha I couldn’t find.

It’s great being able to lend a helping hand and I wish I had more calls to help with. The interesting thing however is that 4 out of 6 calls were from Zimbabweans. Seems suprisingly local, but I did set chiShona as a language so I can’t be too suprised. Still, it’s humbling realizing that Zim has a noticable number of blind people, a lot more than people think given that a lot of them might not even afford the Unternet needed to use Be My Eyes.