'Be My Eyes' App Crowdsources Help For the Blind 66
An anonymous reader writes: A new not-for-profit app, Be My Eyes, aims to help the visually-impaired by connecting them with volunteer users who can support them in their daily lives via live video calls. Once downloaded, Be My Eyes asks the user to identify as blind or sighted, to see if you require help or are offering it. When a blind person requests assistance the app scans the system for an available volunteer. The blind user connects with the volunteer over a video call and points to the item they would like described. Be My Eyes was created by Hans Jørgen Wiberg, a visually-impaired entrepreneur, at a startup event. Wiberg teamed up with Robocat, the Danish software studio behind Haze and Thermo, to make his vision a reality.
Noble Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Noble Idea (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes... I'm very cynical about human nature; I think it's unfortunately very likely some impaired person will be taken advantage of by some scumbag.
More likely, the non-impaired volunteers are going to be asked to describe an awful lot of penises...
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just answer with "it looks like you have cancer and should get it checked" or "i may be non-impaired, but i can't identify things that small without a microscope"
Or "oh god, oh I'm so sorry, just a second, OK, I'll be OK, oh god BLAAAWAAAUUURRRRRRGH!"
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I was sort of wondering the same thing.
is there a legal difference between someone pushing another person in front of a bus verses telling them to go ahead and cross the street as a bus is coming? What if I honestly didn't see the bus when they waved the camera around? How would anyone know the difference.
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The fundamental problem of trust (or lack thereof) is the reason many crowdsourced services don't seem feasible. For example, why hire a taxi when you can get a ride from someone going the direction in exchange for taking someone else on a ride in the future? The problem is the driver may not be trustworthy.
So the consumer is stuck trying to decide between "cheap but untrustworth
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"to make his vision a reality." (Score:2, Funny)
...I see what you did there!
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...I see what you did there!
Are you sure you didn't have to show someone this story on your cell phone and have them explain it?
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Even if I didn't have a penis, there are plenty of attachments that I could purchase to perform the needed tasks.
much more popular (Score:2)
Far Sighted! (Score:2)
This is an excellent idea and by rating volunteers the system can weed out the trouble makers who would steer you wrong.
Good luck with that (Score:2)
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The time taken weeding out trouble-makers is potentially dangerous to the blind person. By the time you find the trouble-maker, the blind person can be literally under the bus.
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The purpose of the app is not navigation help, but help with small tasks-- reading a label on a can, or checking an expiry date for milk.
Someone else who couldn't be bothered to click on the first link in the summary:
The examples the company shows in its product video include visually impaired users getting help with things like reading an expiration date, figuring out what a photograph looks like, and reading signs in an unfamiliar location.
iPhone only (Score:2)
iPhone only is a problem.
On top of that, when I tried to learn android's accessibility options and , the teaching mode pretty much locked me out of my phone - it intercepted every gesture so I had no way of finishing learning how to use it - and that was while looking.
Pointing at something and asking "what is is" isn't a real problem. The real problems are "I need to find 2 socks the same color", "I need my white top and my black skirt", "I need my 'fat jeans' because I'm staying home today", "where's
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1. TFA clearly says Android App is coming soon
2. Blind people very rarely have issues picking clothes, they generally specifically choose clothes that can be easily identified by feel
3. Blind people do face a large number of issues on a daily basis other than picking clothes that this app could definitely help with (as mentioned in TFA, "Is this milk expired?" That's not something a QR code reader will help with
4. A QR code reader is pretty fucking useless if you can't see the code, or tell if the camera i
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Noses work REALLY fucking well for that.
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And I'm sure the grocery store won't mind you opening a few jugs, sniffing them and putting them back if you don't feel they smell fresh enough.
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And I'm sure the grocery store won't mind you opening a few jugs, sniffing them and putting them back if you don't feel they smell fresh enough.
That's what your seeing eye dog is for. If dogs can smell cancers that we can't even detect, they can probably smell milk that's been sitting on the shelf too long. Or he or she can growl menacingly while you open the milk to smell it. If it's past date, it should be removed from the shelves anyway.
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Really shitty grocery store you have there if it's selling expired milk.
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You apparently live in a magical world where your stores are staffed by perfect beings who never make a mistake like overlooking an expired product on the shelf.
Unfortunately, the rest of us live in the real world where stores are generally staffed by teenagers making minimum wage and, as it turns out, they're fallible and do make mistakes.
Perhaps you could invite all the blind people to come live in your world so they can benefit from perfection of the angels you have stocking your grocery stores.
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You've never been to a Publix have you?
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On your point #1, there is no date for an android app, expecially not "coming soon". FTFA: "Kristensen hopes to add Android in the future through grant funding."
Your point number 2 isn't a help for the newly seriously visually impaired. They're not going to go out and buy a complete new wardrobe (and how would they know what stuff matches when shopping?). Custom qr codes on the clothes would let people know what is what, and give them the same clothing options as sighted people.
On your point number 3, an
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I think it will be easier to just say "call (someone I know)" ... no hassles with time zones, language, they also know the area, and may even be in the area to offer more immediate assistance. Plus, I'm more likely to know their schedule so I can call someone else instead of interrupting them.
Is the idea good? Yes. Is it scaleable? Probably not. It also has some serious problems in situations such as when you're in a dead zone and can't use the internet, or battery dying, or you drop the phone in a snowb
In reality.... (Score:1)
"Hey you! Read this train schedule for me!"
"Sorry, I'm busy, gotta be someplace."
"Come on, come on, read it for me."
"Yeah yeah sure, OK. Hey wait, you're not even blind."
"SHUT UP AND READ MOTHERFUCKER!!!! I HAVE A MOTHERFUCKING APP THAT TELLS YOU WHAT TO DO!!!!!"
I can't be the only one who sees the problem (Score:1)
Steering some blind person like "Twitch plays Pokemon [wikipedia.org]":
Do that to someone IRL and somebody goes to jail.
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The volunteer probably doesn't know the building the blind person is looking for. So, they use google maps, which the blind person can already use to get there (along with their trusty dog). You still need a dog because otherwise you'll (a) bump into people, (b) tend to mis-step onto the street while walking along the sidewalk, or on people's lawns, or into garbage cans and recycling bins, or trip on the curb if the street is in such bad repair that your feet can't tell you that you've passed the "crown" i
Meh. That's What Volunteer Readers Are For. (Score:2)
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A blind or visually-impaired person can get a friend, relative or trusted volunteer to go with them to the store, do the snail mail, write parts of checks, etc. I know because I do a lot of this stuff for my officemate.
For sure, but nobody likes being so dependent on someone else. All this app does is change the dependency, not help get (or preserve) autonomy. And from the article, he envisions turning this into a subscription service since it costs money to run, and will cost more if it scales up.
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It's not changing the dependency at all, but it is diffusing the burden on the volunteer, which is more dignified for everyone.
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It's not changing the dependency at all, but it is diffusing the burden on the volunteer, which is more dignified for everyone.
Really? Really??? When my eyes were so bad that I had to take out a wad of money and ask the cashier to take what was needed while others waited in line because I was slower, the only reason that wasn't humiliating was because the cashiers already knew me. Having to wait for some volunteer to tell me if I got the right change back would have been worse - it would have been an indirect accusation at the cashiers honesty and integrity.
Instead of "diffusing the burden on the volunteer," why not use the tech
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And from the article, he envisions turning this into a subscription service since it costs money to run, and will cost more if it scales up.
I didn't see any indication of a subscription in the articles I read. May I ask where you read that?
Also, from your various posts, you seem rather opposed to this app, or perhaps the general concept. As someone who may be facing more sight-related challenges in the future, it seems like you'd have a lot to gain if this actually works out well in practice as it sounds in concept. May I ask what your specific concerns or complaints are?
I agree that there are a lot of theoretical ways that vision-impaired p
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These aren't the articles I found last night, one of which was unequivocal, but you can start here [dailymail.co.uk]:
The app is currently free, but as the firm explained, when its initial funding comes to an end in September 2015, they may consider subscription model or donations.
and here [techcrunch.com]
There’s no current plans to monetise the app, though one future possibility, should demand outstrip supply, is that power users could pay to top up the amount of help they require.
Get them hooked, then charge them money ... the same model both crack dealers and free videogames use. Yes, I'm cynical, especially since not-for-profits can be very profitable for those running them. Sure, offering a service, then charging those who need it the most is a viable business model, but it still sucks.
I believe that they're making it up as they go along.
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I've always thought it would be cheaper (Score:3)
I'm talking about real applications, not your shitty website. But those, too.
Ever done real ADA testing with a reader? Holy shit. I'd much prefer sighted human help to that. It's not like I'd be looking at porn since I can't see.
You Must Be New Here (Score:2)
The fact that you think the only porn on the internet is visual porn is just sooo cute. There is everything from relatively normal smut like literotica and the alt.sex.stories text repository, to the terrifyingly strange erotic fiction that every fan fiction archive contains about every property from Harry Potter to The Bible to My Little Pony. As a person who was born completely blind, I've never had any problems with a shortage of porn. And I'd much rather access it all in privacy with my screen reader
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It takes some extra
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I was under the impression that the W3C testing would, in fact, catch things like layout tables, etc. But maybe I'm thinking of Wave or one of the other testing tools?
Regardless, your statement that Jaws, or any other screen reader on the market, ignores stylesheets is just wrong. Using display:none and/or visibility:hidden will hide things from modern screen readers just fine. Thanks to the recent advances in things like WAI-ARIA, even dynamic content can be made to work, these days. I do almost all of
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I quote from CaptQuark:
It takes some extra work to produce a visually appealing page that a screen reader can easily read and navigate after the style sheets are ignored by Jaws. It requires careful planning to design a page with multiple columns (menu column on the left, main content in the middle, additional information on the right) and organizing it so a screen reader can skip to the main content without listening to menu choice after menu choice on every page but still looks appealing to sighted users after the style sheets are applied.
This is an example of what you are not supposed to do. Windows 8 makes an easy example, convolving the needs of different UI paradigms is poor design. Proper application ADA support uses two interfaces, one for the sighted, and another for the blind, designed specifically for use by a text reader. Vi and Emacs do not require such bifurcation, but these are exceptions that prove the point; nobody in their right mind would relea
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The problem with having two separate interfaces is that the one intended for the blind will never, ever get updates or new features. Gmail, in fact, did this, for a while. They still do have the basic HTML interface, AFAIK. It offers no translation, no address book autocomplete, none of the new features for marking and filtering messages (important, etc), and generally hasn't been given a single update since the day it was released. Thankfully, the standard Gmail interface is now accessible, so blind us
Will it work for web pages? (Score:1)
The blind can ride bikes with sonar (Score:1)
Although not strictly related, makes me remember blind people like Daniel Kish who can use echolocation to do things like ride a bicycle by making clicking noises with his mouth and perceiving the three-dimensional structure of the world around him from the refracted sound waves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Pretty impressive, and, even as a sighted person, I find this idea interesting for seeing in the dark.
For family communications ... (Score:2)
... http://www.aetonix.com/ [aetonix.com]. The targetdemographic are elderly and disabled, and the focus is communications with family, care providers, and medical staff. Not a tablet, but geared towards those for whom a tablet format isn't quite sufficient.