2015-01-19

A new iPhone app called 'Be My Eyes' connects volunteers with blind people through a video call to help with simple daily tasks that can prove to be big challenges . The nonprofit app connects blind people with a sighted person through a video call to provide immediate assistance with a simple task that can prove difficult without vision, such as knowing if milk in the fridge is expired. It "lets anyone with a smart phone become a virtual, visual Good Samaritan." The app was envisioned by Hans Jørgen Wiberg, a 50-year-old craftsman in Copenhagen who has been visually impaired since he was 25. Follow on Twitter: @BeMyEyes   Also, Facebook has a tool called  Visual Answers , a microvolunteering application that posts visual questions from people who are blind, and allows volunteers to answer such. It is discussed in  Gauging Receptiveness to Social Microvolunteering , a white paper by Erin Brady, Meredith Ringel Morris, and Jeffrey P. Bigham, for  Microsoft Research  and submitted to the Association for Computing Machinery’s Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2015).

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