Be My Eyes

People with visual impairments now have the ability to see thanks to complete strangers and their smart phones. A Danish development team has created an iPhone app that lets sighted people help the blind on the rare occasions they need it. It’s called Be My Eyes and it’s a non-profit, crowdsourcing app, only available on iOS for now, that pairs a sighted persons with blind users by utilizing the video chat capability within the app.

The concept is pretty simple: when a visually impaired person needs help with, let’s say, seeing if the milk in their fridge has expired, they simply tap their screen to find the first available sighted helper. Once a helper accepts the request, the blind person points his or her rear camera at the problem and the sighted person can assist them through video chat. Pretty simple.

if you sign up, the Be My Eyes team says there’s no need to worry about “leaving a blind person hanging” if you’re not available to answer. Over 300,000 helpers have signed up since the app’s release to help the more than 23,000 visually impaired users who have signed up so far. With this many users coupled with over 100,000 instances of aid given, it just goes to show that they’re still some nice functionality to be had in some pretty old tech.

To learn more about Be My Eyes, you can check out the app’s website at www.bemyeyes.org or just download it in the iTunes App Store for free.