Anyone Who Needs Help Seeing Has 2 Million Pairs of Eyes Available With This App

When Rory Hoffman needs to read the labels on his cassette tapes, he opens up an app. Marian Helling Wildgruber finds the spices in her kitchen cabinet by pulling out her phone. Tabitha Jackson grabs her phone before she goes grocery shopping.
Hoffman, Wildgruber and Jackson all are blind or visually impaired. So tasks like reading labels, selecting the right herbs and navigating stores can prove challenging.
That’s where Be My Eyes comes in. It’s a mobile app that connects people who are blind or visually impaired with volunteers who have normal vision. By tapping their camera’s video function, volunteers can guide people with vision impairments in a variety of daily tasks.
The app launched in 2015, and within 11 days, it had 100,000 volunteers. Now, four years later, two million volunteers have joined Be My Eyes. It’s part of a movement coined microvolunteering, whereby small tasks performed by many people can add up to real impact  on a large scale. For Be My Eyes volunteers, there’s no commitment to a certain number of calls. It’s just a chance to help someone out when they need it.
There is an estimated 1.3 billion people with some form of visual impairment worldwide. People who are visually impaired might have family or neighbors they can rely on, but on-demand support 24/7 is unlikely. Sometimes an extra set of eyes is helpful.
Hoffman uses Be My Eyes a few times a week. He typically relies on a neighbor to help him with tasks that require normal vision, but it’s nice to know there’s immediate help at hand, he says.
“I don’t have to wait for anyone to come, I can just take care of it immediately.”
Hoffman, who is a musician, recently wanted to replace the strings on his guitar. But it was impossible for him to feel the slight differences between each string. So Hoffman pulled out his phone and using the phone’s voice recognition feature, made a call on Be My Eyes.
There, a volunteer popped up and read the guitar string labels. In just a few minutes, Hoffman had the right strings for his guitar.
“There are some times when having somebody with a pair of eyes just makes things helpful,” he says. “And to be able to just connect to somebody who’s available to help, that’s really a great idea.”
The app was founded by Hans Jørgen Wiberg, a Danish furniture designer. Widberg, who is visually impaired, was talking with a few of his blind friends when they said they all relied on FaceTime to connect with family and friends for assistance.
Widberg realized this idea could work with volunteers. He brought his idea to a startup weekend in Denmark in 2012, where he met Thelle Kristensen. Together they formed a team. It took two and a half years to develop and bring the app to the market.
“The fire in our belly was to make a worldwide network of volunteers to help out, and it’s been great to see the reaction with ten times as many sighted as blind people,” says Kristensen, the co-founder and CEO of Be My Eyes.
Lauren Traut was deep in conversation when her phone rang, and she received a notification from Be My Eyes that someone needed assistance.
“I told my friend, ‘Hold on. Pause. I got to take this call.’”
On the line was a woman who needed help reading a letter. It was from a church thanking her for a donation she recently made in honor of her husband and daughter who had recently passed.
Traut said the appreciation in the woman’s words had a lasting impact.
“Granted that task probably wasn’t life-changing for her,” Traut says, “But it’s simple things like that that maybe fully sighted people take for granted.”
Traut says the sheer magnitude of volunteers on the app is incredible. But this also means a single volunteer won’t get too many calls.
Traut downloaded the app in June 2017. Since then, she says she’s only received six or seven calls.
But for Wildgruber, it’s reassuring to know she won’t be bothering anyone.
“You know the volunteers are answering the phone if they want to,” she says. “And knowing that if you call a few times a day, you’re not bothering anyone.”
“Sometimes it’s a quick fix, other times it’s a longer conversation of what’s life like where you are,” says Christian Erfurt, the chief executive of Be My Eyes. “That reminds us that we’re not that different, and the gap between ‘us and them’ is minimized.”
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Editor’s note: An earlier version of the headline incorrectly stated there were 100,000 volunteers on the app. The correct number is 2 million.

This Blind Football Player Proves That You Don’t Need Sight to Accomplish Your Dreams

Close one eye and make a fist with a hole the size of a dime and put it over your opened eye. That’s how much (or rather, how little) football player Aaron Golub can see out of his left eye, according to his private coach Chris Rubio. And out of his right eye? Nothing.
Despite being legally blind, the graduating senior from Newton South High School (NSHS) in Massachusetts will be part of Tulane’s Division I football program this fall as their preferred walk-on long snapper.
“Aaron is a tremendous young man who has not let adversity overcome his desire to fulfill his dreams of playing college football,” Tulane head coach Curtis Johnson said in a statement.
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It’s no surprise that Golub made his dream come true. CBS Boston reports that for the past two years the young man worked very hard — practicing long-snapping every morning before school and on weekends. He became so good at the difficult act that NSHS’s football coach Ted Dalicandro remarked to CBS that Golub is “the best” long snapper he’s seen at the high school level.
His determination and skill has certainly paid off.
“If you set your mind to it, then you can do it,” Golub said. “There’s nothing that you can’t accomplish if you really want to do it.”
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The Blind Teacher Who Has Vision Like No Other

Jimmy Palmaro can’t read from a textbook or a give a traditional Powerpoint presentation, but it’s clear as day that he can teach.
Palmaro, 57, is an after-school volunteer tutor at the Colony South Brooklyn Houses, a social services nonprofit in that offers social and educational programs to the disadvantaged in Brooklyn, New York. Better known to his students as Mr. P, you can see in the touching video above that even though he’s blind, he’s quite the effective educator.
As Huffington Post reports, in the 1980s Palmaro was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative eye disease that can run in families. Over the next 24 years, he slowly lost his vision, which meant he had to leave his job at the post office. Despite this, he found a new calling as a teacher and for the past 12 years, he’s been tutoring elementary and junior high school children.
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Maybe because he’s blind, Palmaro is extra adept at communicating to his students and getting them to talk through things with him. “My students have to work out the question and verbally express it to me, a process which forces them to familiarize themselves with the problem in a new way,” he told photographer Phyllis B. Dooney, who created the video. “I am an unusually good listener.”
And he’s certainly been an inspiration to his students, many of whom come from disadvantaged backgrounds. “I tell my students, ‘Don’t let your limitations define you. Don’t be shortsighted,'” Palermo told HuffPo. “I’ve gained things through my blindness that are not limitations.”
 
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These Scientists Are Helping Blind People Experience the Majesty of Space

The spectacular imagery of distant galaxies captured by the Hubble telescope can make you rethink the nature of the universe. So why shouldn’t blind people be able to experience them too? That’s what motivated two scientists, Carol Christian and Antonella Nota, to create 3D models of Hubble’s stellar data. Their first draft is a series of square panels with what look like topographical renderings of mountain ranges. In fact, the panels are richly textured physical descriptions of faraway star clusters. Dots and ridges indicate different substances, like filaments and dust, while the surface’s varying height is meant to indicate distance. “They would be able to spatially understand where important features are relative to everything else and what the structure is,” Christian and Nota told Gizmodo. They plan to make the CAD files, or 3D blueprints, available to the general public soon.
MORE: This student solved his speech impediment with a pen and Denzel Washington