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Be My Eyes – Lend your eyes to the blind

bemyeyes.org

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Re: Be My Eyes – Lend your eyes to the blind

#111

Post by khebbie »

dntrkv wrote: post #85
khebbie wrote: post #13

I am part of the team who created the app and api. Many blind users use the voice over feature built into ios as @rgoodwintx mentioned.

One problem that I see (you guys might already address this) but if I'm a helper and I get a call from a blind person and I have just a couple minutes to help but the blind person needs 10 minutes of help it would be inefficient to connect me with them. One way to solve this would be for the blind to select a time range of how much help they need (1 minute, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, etc...) and then when it calls the he…

We didn't think about that but will take it into consideration. The app will probably stay free as that is the whole base of this. But the expected timespan is very usable. Thank you.

Re: Be My Eyes – Lend your eyes to the blind

#112

Post by dictum »

putzdown wrote: post #106

Curious: a couple of the images of "blind" eyes show eyes with no pupils. Forgive my ignorance, but is this common among blind people, or is it a Photoshopism? If a Photoshopism, then is it wise for a website offering services for the blind to misrepresent the physiology of blindness?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cataract

Re: Be My Eyes – Lend your eyes to the blind

#113

Post by chiurox »

This would not work in Brazil, at least currently, where our 3G/4G are laughable... But it's a good start. The machine learning applicability could be awesome. Maybe one day we can have a smartphone guiding the blind without the need for an actual human to be on the other side.

Re: Be My Eyes – Lend your eyes to the blind

#114

Post by ctdonath »

Sounds like a prime candidate for Amazon's Mechanical Turks. Vet & train a core group, and pay them to narrate pictures/video. Not hard work, not high pay, but (as a friend has found) there are competent people willing to do such work for humble pay.

Re: Be My Eyes – Lend your eyes to the blind

#116

Post by [deleted] »

ndarilek wrote: post #67
mwcampbell wrote: post #21

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…

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…

[deleted]

Re: Be My Eyes – Lend your eyes to the blind

#117

Post by elicash »

ndarilek wrote: post #94
rdez6173 wrote: post #87

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.

That's actually an interesting bit of feedback. Thanks. I'm using SIP/web RTC for my for-profit version of this and had considered adding text chat, but I couldn't come up with a good use case so left it out. It'd probably also be useful when the text of something is important and you'd like a record after the call ended. I'll add that to the features list.

Yeah, I was about to use the Be My Eyes app to help and as soon as I realized I'd have to actually have a video/audio chat with a person, I admittedly chickened-out.

Re: Be My Eyes – Lend your eyes to the blind

#118

Post by bramd »

detaro wrote: post #101
CJefferson wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think computers killed off Braille, particularly among the young. Both Windows (with the right software) and Mac OS X (straight out of the box) are surprisingly (it suprised me!) usable by blind people.

With speech output instead of Braille devices? Interesting.

> With speech output instead of Braille devices? Interesting.

Both. The one doesn't exclude the other. I'm a heavy user of text-to-speech at high rates to digest content easily, but prefer braille when coding or doing some work on a shell/terminal.

You'll see much more braille displays in some European countries because they get subsidized by health insurance or a government entity that provides assistive technology for the workplace. This workstation has a 88 cell braille display, which means it can display 88 braille characters at a time. That unit costs $10k or so, depending on market and EUR/USD rate etc, but to give you an idea of the price tag. I also have a mobile unit with 40 cells, I guess that one is about $6k or so.

Re: Be My Eyes – Lend your eyes to the blind

#119

Post by bramd »

ndarilek wrote: post #67
mwcampbell wrote: post #21

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…

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…

Hmm, the reply button to submit this comment is just reachable with tab as it should be, so I don't see any issues there?

Have you looked at something like BigBlueButton? I recently used it to give a webinar. They don't have an HTML 5 client yet unfortunately, but they integrate some interesting things to provide video/audio over WebRTC and to their Flash client. I think it uses Freeswitch for the audio/video part.

If you nail the technical issues, you might find that lots of blindies are not that good videographers. You need a high quality stream and preferably a method to let the remote party control the camera zoom. I use "remote eyes" in various situations and had quite some issues focussing my camera in the beginning. I use USB camera glasses or a smartphone, usually just through a Skype connection.

Re: Be My Eyes – Lend your eyes to the blind

#120

Post by 27182818284 »

khebbie wrote: post #13

I am part of the team who created the app and api. Many blind users use the voice over feature built into ios as @rgoodwintx mentioned.

What made you choose iOS first over Android? (Was it an arbitrary choice or one driven by data that more iOS users would be on board with this sort of project than Android users? Maybe something simpler like the developers had more iOS experience?)
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