Mixing It Up with Be My eyes

It’s 6:24 am on Sunday morning and Eli, my 4-year old, has woken up earlier than normal. I’ve been up for some time now just checking my news feed when I hear his angelic little voice asking me if he can watch something on TV. You see, we are one of those households, which the kids don’t typically get to watch TV. But on Saturday and Sunday mornings, we loosen up the rules a bit, but not before 7 am. So, I tell him let’s get breakfast ready before Mom and his little brother wake up, and by the time we are done, he can watch something on TV.

The day before, we had already decided that we were going to make blueberry muffins in our waffle iron. So, Eli grabbed the box out of the pantry. He knew I couldn’t read the box, but he tried his best to decipher what the ingredients were from the numbers and pictures on the box. When he said two cups of water, two eggs, and 1 cup of oil, I was a little skeptical. The 2 eggs sounded right, but the two cups of water and one cup of oil seemed a little excessive. I grabbed my phone, and opened up my trusty SeeingAI App, and pointed it at the box to try to read the directions. SeeingAI is a free Microsoft app for iOS for people who are blind or low vision. It uses the phone camera to read printed text, currency, and describe physical objects, product labels and colors, among other things.

Within seconds of pointing my camera at the box, my phone started to read everything it saw. However, this time, I wasn’t easily able to understand what I needed for the mixture. So, I opened up another app on my phone, which I hadn’t yet used, called Be My Eyes.

Be My Eyes is a free app that connects blind and low-vision people with sighted volunteers and company representatives for visual assistance through a live video call. With this app, instead of using artificial intelligence like SeeingAI, I would have an actual person on the other end of the camera telling me what I wanted to know. So I clicked on the “Call first available volunteer” button and in just a few seconds I heard a stranger saying, “hello!”

After explaining what I wanted to do, the person on the other end of the phone said “let’s go” and asked me to position the phone camera so that he could see the directions more clearly. He acknowledged that English was his second language, but he did great in reading out the ingredients and directions. Eli and I were then able to get everything we needed to make the batter. We thanked the voice on the other end of the phone, and we got to work, mixing everything up!

When you look at the numbers behind Be My eyes, it’s pretty amazing and I’m quite sure this won’t be the last time using the app. Check out the stats on who's using the app:

4,672,832 VOLUNTEERS

300,875 BLIND & LOW-VISION PEOPLE

150+ COUNTRIES

180+ LANGUAGES

This experience was so simple and efficient. And best of all, it allowed me to do this activity with my son without having to rely on my wife who is sighted. However, what gave me the biggest smile was when my wife walked in to the kitchen and Eli excitedly told her how we used “Be My Eyes” to make the batter! As a Dad who's blind, I’m glad my son sees how I’m able to do the same things as other people, but my approach my be a little different.

By the way, to Eli’s credit, he was close in telling me the ingredients - we actually needed 2/3 cups of water, 2 eggs, and ? cup of oil – he just didn’t understand what a fraction was!

Would you consider being a volunteer for Be My Eyes? Let me know in the comments if you give it a try.