91–100 of 165 posts
I find the thought of communicating directly with someone a bit anxiety-inducing, but I would really love to volunteer for something like this. I would be happy to transcribe a letter, or product expiry date so that I could be read back to the user with text-to-speech in real-time. I suspect that I'm in the minority and this is likely a non-issue.
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Blindness is unfortunately a nearly crushing disability economically. 74% of the blind are unemployed [1] (there is another figure you will occasionally also see of 13% unemployment for the blind, that's a US Government statistic that excludes anyone who is not considered in the list of potentially employed people). Equally important for HN-type readers to know is that Braille literacy is highly correlated with emplo…
Wow, I would not have expected those low Braille literacy figures. For the UK, numbers seem to be similar. I couldn't find any for other European countries, but at least here in Germany Braille markings are very common, so I'd always thought that most blind can use them.
Think about how interesting it would be to help out a complete stranger from anywhere in the world. I think it would become quite addicting.
I find the thought of communicating directly with someone a bit anxiety-inducing, but I would really love to volunteer for something like this. I would be happy to transcribe a letter, or product expiry date so that I could be read back to the user with text-to-speech in real-time. I suspect that I'm in the minority and this is likely a non-issue.
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Upvoted, though I don't like that idea. People tend to treat differently things they do for money and things they do for non-monetary rewards. In this particular case, I'm not sure which version would be better for the blind, but I think I'd prefer to help for free. I'm interested in further discussion. Input from actual blind people would be really helpful here.
Well, for what it's worth, I'm legally blind (I have enough sight to read a computer screen up close, but not enough to drive). And I have totally blind friends who like the idea of a paid service like this. (I personally know the guy whose blog post I referenced in the addendum to my first post.)
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I'd suggest (almost) exactly the opposite, actually... Charge $5/mo to be a 'helper' and keep it free for blind users. I suspect there are enough folks out there who would be happy to pay $5 for the opportunity to help others (maybe I'm too much of an optimist though... who knows...) That way you cover costs, and filter out a lot of potential trolls.
Paying someone to be a middleman on my volunteer charity work feels pretty gross.
If they are not providing a valuable service, they will go out of business.
Great concept, though, and it being FOSS is a huge plus in my book (and will probably help with developing more applications around this for non-iOS platforms).
Nice idea, but I think it would be better if it were commercial, with the blind user paying, the sighted helper getting paid, and the app developers getting a cut. The payment could be by the minute. I think the general public will be more inclined to treat blind people as equals if we demolish the notion that blind people require charity. Addendum: Lest anyone think I'm talking out of my ass, here's a blog post from…
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Actually, I haven't abandoned it--literally working on it this very minute, in fact. :) The problem is that multi-platform video interchange is a hard problem. Very hard. SIP only gets you so far even with web RTC, then you hit issues where server X doesn't like delegating authentication to anything else, Y does but requires super-indepth knowledge of the protocol, and Z may or may not but it's got so many modules it…
Also, something else that bothers me a bit about lots of the comments in this thread: It's nice that people want to keep things free and to avoid the influence that money might bring to a thing. But the unfortunate reality is that we live in a society that doesn't let me buy groceries, beer or housing with goodwill. Sure, help is a good thing, and I'm the last person who wants to live in a society where our interacti…
We need companies like this to have high cash flow, so they can hire top developers and create jobs where an engineer's daily work goes directly to improve human quality of life.