Volunteering for busy people

It’s not that I hate technology or social media, far from it, but I do seek real benefit rather than inane sharing just because it’s possible. In the way that eBay enabled charities to transform an annual Saturday afternoon sale of jumble back to a local population of donors into a significantly more profitable perpetual world market, innovative ideas give technology and electronic communication the potential to deliver life changing benefits.

I was recently introduced to Be My Eyes. As a designer, photographer and art lover I’ve always feared diminishing visual acuity let alone blindness and cannot imagine life without visual stimulus, or even worse ability to manage everyday tasks. So a service than enables me to flexibly offer help at the unpredictable times I have free to an international group needing assistance with their everyday tasks is a great application of technology to a real and challenging problem.

Although smart devices using Apple VoiceOver can make all sorts of tasks easier or possible, technology still has limitations demanding direct human interaction is the only alternative. For the blind this is a problem. A partial solution is to phone a friend, sharing smartphone video to assist with reading labels or recognising an unfamiliar object or picture. But even within a sizeable group of family and friends it’s not certain anyone will necessarily be available when needed. What about if an emergency arises in the middle of the night – for instance needing to read a drug instruction leaflet? What if the group of helpers could be global, including different time zones? Enter Be My Eyes.

Launched in January 2015 by visually impaired Danish Founder Hans Jørgen Wiberg, Be My Eyes creates a global iPhone community enabling blind users to establish a one way video call to a sighted volunteer of their own language who can describe what the blind person is showing so that, working together, the problem in hand can be solved. In the first 11 days, 7,858 blind users have been helped 20,168 times by a network of 97,674 sighted volunteers. Now that’s a real need addressed. The service is currently free but funding is expected to run out in September 2015 by which point a sustainable business mode will need to be established to maintain this excellent micro-volunteering facility.

Meanwhile, whenever I’m free I log online to receive my first request for help…

http://www.bemyeyes.org/

Be My Eyes – helping blind see from Be My Eyes on Vimeo.