The World Health Organization estimates there are about 285 million people worldwide living with blindness or low vision. Sam Proulx, longtime host of The InclusionHub Podcast and Accessibility Evangelist at leading accessibility testing platform Fable, is one. So is Hans Jørgen Wiberg, founder of Be My Eyes.
Be My Eyes is a free app connecting this community with sighted volunteers for assistance with a broad and ever-growing range of tasks: from checking ingredients for a meal to ensuring a stove or other appliance is functioning properly to—really just about anything!
In this episode, the second installment of our Founding Partner Series highlighting the incredible people and work of the businesses that make this podcast possible, Jeffrey Howard of Morey Creative Studios interviews Hans about this amazing mobile app’s origin, phenomenal growth, enablement of users to ask for help without really asking for help, and much more.
Welcome to another episode of our Founding Partner Series, spotlighting InclusionHub Founding Partner Be My Eyes!
Discussing the founding of Be My Eyes, its evolution, features, and so much more, is its founder Hans Jørgen Wiberg.
Be My Eyes has one main goal: to make the world more accessible for blind and low-vision people. It does so by connecting this community of users with more than 6 million sighted volunteers and companies from across the globe. Users can request assistance in more than 180 languages and counting, making the app the biggest online community for blind and low-vision people, as well as one of the largest micro-volunteering platforms in the world.
In this snippet, Hans shares his thoughts on what he considers to be one of the app’s greatest gifts:
“I have a wonderful wife and kids and wonderful neighbors,” he tells Jeffrey. “And all of them really want to help me. But I don’t want to ask them all the time. And that is the kind of real power of Be My Eyes—that you can ask for help without really asking, it doesn't feel that way.
“You just press a button and someone has volunteered to do that,” continues Hans. “And you know that you don’t disturb them, because they answered—and you can make 100 calls a day if you want to, and you will never get the same volunteer. And if you are in some troublesome situation, but you need a lot of help, you cannot, kind of, call your sister all the time. So it’s a really powerful thing that we have so many volunteers who are stepping up and making it so easy to request this help.”
To learn more about Be My Eyes and all the guests and topics featured in this and previous episodes, subscribe to The InclusionHub Podcast via your favorite podcast apps. You can also read along with this episode’s transcript!
The InclusionHub Podcast is sponsored by our Founding Partners: leading customer relationship management software provider Salesforce; HubSpot Diamond Partner Agency Morey Creative Studios; leading accessibility testing platform powered by people with disabilities Fable; and Be My Eyes, a free app connecting blind and low-vision people with sighted volunteers. Stay tuned for more insights from them all as we continue our Founding Partner Series!