Broadeye: Talking With Doctors About Blindness

Will Butler:

Hello, and welcome to the Be My Eyes Podcast. I'm Will Butler. This week, it's a little bit of a different type of episode. In all my travels for Be My Eyes, I talk to a lot of interesting people, and I was recently invited to be on a podcast called Broad Eye. That's B-R-O-A-D E-Y-E, to chat with two eye health professionals. Their names are Shawn Maloney and Bruno Fernandez. We talk a lot about what's going on on Be My Eyes, kind of pulling the curtain back to behind the scenes of Be My Eyes, and most of all, we get into the disconnect between the medical system and the blind and low vision community and all the knowledge that it has.

Will Butler:

I think this is just the very beginning of many conversations you'll hear about how the medical and social aspects of blindness can get better connected, and I hope you enjoy the episode. Big shout-out to the Broad Eye Podcast, who are doing regular episodes with all sorts of doctors and different eye health professionals multiple times a week. We are off and running with our latest giveaway on the Be My Eyes Podcast. We're giving away an eSight 4. That is one of the wearable digital magnifiers. They retail at thousands of dollars, and we're giving one away to one lucky listener. I told you a little bit about our eSight giveaway last week, but this week, I brought in someone who knows a little bit more, eSight coach Rosa Henderson.

Will Butler:

So tell me about the first time you put on the eSight. Who told you about it? Where did you find out about it?

Rosa Henderson:

I went into a conference center, and it was a room set up. They had a whiteboard and some posters and things on the wall. They had me put the eSight glasses on, and then they showed me how to use the magnification. Then all of a sudden, I was like those things that were just like blurry smudges or shapes around me started to form. I was like, "Wait, wait. That's a poster. I can see the writing." It was pretty crazy.

Will Butler:

How often do you wear it?

Rosa Henderson:

It all depends on the day's activities. Everybody has a different vision acuity, as you I'm sure well know. Because I am more significantly sighted at 2200, I don't need them close up. I don't need them here in my house, per se, but anything that involves going to the grocery store, riding paratransit, riding the city bus, and even an Uber, if you think about safety, I can verify the Uber driver's license plate and make sure I'm getting into the right car and things like that. So a lot of my usage is out and about, and I did use them for college, which was a whole different world than when I was in high school, because in college, with the eSight, I was able to see the board, the PowerPoint, read a regular textbook, and interact in all the stuff that I needed to do around campus.

Will Butler:

Thank you so much, Rosa. Get your name in at bemyeyes.com/esight, and now onto the show.

Shawn Maloney:

Today, we're here with special guest Will Butler. He's a VP at Be My Eyes, an extremely popular app among people with low vision, myself included. So Will, thanks for joining us today.

Will Butler:

Really great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Shawn Maloney:

Thanks. So I was hoping we can kick things off with just a brief overview of Be My Eyes. What is the app? How did it come about? Who uses it?

Will Butler:

Yeah, so Be My Eyes was basically the brainchild of a guy in Denmark named Hans, Hans Jørgen Wiberg, and Hans had a degenerative eye condition, retinitis pigmentosa, which I think y'all are familiar with. It was right around the time when video chat was becoming available on the smartphone, so FaceTime, Skype, stuff like that. He realized that the smartphone camera was high quality enough to where he could initiate a video call with a friend or a family member, and he could actually point the camera around and they could be his eyes. So he thought, "Oh, that's pretty cool. I can always get a pair of eyes when I need it." But the problem was he couldn't really, because sometimes things would come up in the middle of the night. Sometimes things would come up right when he had just gotten off the phone with a friend or family member. He thought, "This is going to get old really quickly if I keep calling the same people over and over and asking them to be my eyes."

Will Butler:

But as blind or visually impaired people, every time we step out the door, practically, somebody wants to try to help us, often when we don't really need help. So he thought, "What if those people could be available to help me when I actually do need help, which is when no one's watching?" So that was where the idea for Be My Eyes came about. We created an app that allowed anyone to sign up as a volunteer to be available to answer video calls on demand. We had no idea whether or not there would be any uptake, but overnight, literally, we had about 10,000 people sign up to volunteer and about 1,000 blind users. So we were very quickly off to the races, and within several weeks, we were being used in dozens of countries, dozens of languages. Today we're entirely global. So it's just a community of people, millions of people now, helping blind and low vision people see whatever it is they want to see.

Bruno Fernandez:

Yeah, that's awesome. Will, you just talked about community there, and your title is VP of Community, right? Frankly, it was the first time I heard that. So can you explain what exactly a VP of community does?

Will Butler:

Yeah. I mean, essentially, I think if you want to get philosophical about it, I think what most blind and low vision people lack is a strong community that understands them. As someone who became legally blind when I was about 19 and was struggling with vision loss all through my teenage years, there was never a moment when a doctor sat me down and told me, "Hey, you are now legally blind. You are now visually impaired, and you're probably going to be that way. So everything's going to be fine, but you're going to have to learn some new skills. Here are some tools, and here are some people. Here are some places you can go to get everything you need so that you can do the things you want to do." No one ever had that conversation with me.

Will Butler:

You go blind in the doctor's office most of the time, and even though it's an uncomfortable moment, it's an opportunity to plug someone in with community. But that doesn't happen for most people. Shawn, I'd love to hear your own thoughts about whether or not you got access to those resources. So I really do view my role as a community builder for our group of blind and low vision users of the app, because we do have the biggest global blind community in the world. I feel like there are so many opportunities to plug these people in with one another and help us all benefit one another.

Bruno Fernandez:

Yeah, that's great. I'm a firm believer of community also for pretty much everything, and I can give you the perspective of an ophthalmologist, right, which I am, that we're not really trained to deal with people once they lose their vision, right? We are trained to diagnose and treat ophthalmological conditions, but once people lose their sight, I mean, the most we do-

Will Butler:

Right.

Bruno Fernandez:

... it's kind of like just give them a referral.

Will Butler:

Right.

Bruno Fernandez:

Of course, there's more that we can do it. That's for sure.

Will Butler:

Yeah. It's great to hear you say that, because sometimes we feel a little bit like ... Sometimes I feel a little bit like, "Am I crazy? Am I missing something, or where's the gap in the communication?" But the truth of the matter is doctors aren't taught. Your job is to save people's sight, right? Not to help people who don't have sight. So the disconnect makes sense, but we have to do everything we can to patch it up.

Bruno Fernandez:

Yeah, no, for sure. I guess that's what you're doing, right? I saw that of course that was very popular, the app that your company developed, and you ran into a very interesting problem that you have a lot more people willing to help than people actually using the service, right?

Will Butler:

Yeah. So it's really interesting, because I think a lot of people see the numbers, right? It's about a 20 to 1 or in some cases a 10 to 1 ratio of volunteers to users of the app. A lot of people go, "Oh, that's too many people helping, not enough people using it." But actually, we like that ratio, and that's because when a blind user calls for support, we have to make sure that there's someone available. So even if there are 20 people signed up, for that one person, the odds that one of them is available are pretty low. So kind of like Uber or Lyft, we ping a whole group of people at a time, and whoever is the most available will be the first one to answer it. So someone is at work. Someone's in the restroom. Someone's making dinner. Not everyone is able to answer the calls at all times. So we like having a much higher number of volunteers as compared to users. So as we grow, we try to keep that ratio roughly at about 10 or 20 to 1.

Shawn Maloney:

So I know I can tell you from personal experience that that's a good thing, because I've used the app on several occasions, and I don't think I've ever had to wait more than about 15, 18 seconds for somebody to pick up the other line. I was always pretty impressed by that. So yeah, I think having that large pool of volunteers is certainly valuable. I'm just going to touch back on a point you made earlier about community and my thoughts at that time you're diagnosed as being blind or visually impaired. For sure in my own experience, that was definitely lacking. I had some family support and whatnot, but it's something I've known since I was five years old as well, that it will happen in my case.

Shawn Maloney:

But yeah, I think that there's definitely a gap in the services, but also the knowledge, right? Bruno just alluded to that. As an ophthalmologist, I couldn't go back to my primary eye care provider and say, "Hey, listen, I'm struggling with trying to see what the teacher is putting on the" ... It was overhead projectors in those days. It wasn't PowerPoints. "What do I do?" It was like, "Well, I don't know. Talk to your teacher." So I think that having these conversations and, of course, what you're doing over on your own podcasts, we'll talk about those at the end, I think that providing certain information to people, and it's certainly useful. I'm just wondering. The standard Be My Eyes service, it differs from the service that you offer for workplaces. What is different about the service?

Will Butler:

Yeah, absolutely. I'm glad you asked. So Be My Eyes was conceived as this very kind of altruistic model of people helping each other, and there's no money exchanged or anything. The service is entirely free and unlimited for the blind users who are through using the app. But the thing about running it is we didn't want to put barriers in front of the blind users. We wanted to figure out how to create a business model that was sustainable, but it didn't seem right to run advertising or subscriptions or anything like that. So we spent a long time trying to figure out what was the right business model, and then we realized that companies want to support blind and visually impaired people as well.

Will Butler:

So that was sort of where we created our business-facing products and software. So what we do is we allow companies to build their own Be My Eyes networks, and they can use them in a public-facing manner or private, internal-facing. So if you're a big company, let's say you're a hospital, you can create a public-facing Be My Eyes network that's viewable on the Be My Eyes app for anyone in your region, and people can call that line for support directly from a representative, but video support, Be My Eyes style support from the representatives that the hospital determines.

Will Butler:

Then similarly, Be My Eyes for Work is the internal tool that let's say the hospital has employees who are blind or low vision, and they want to support those employees with hospital tasks, or maybe there's inaccessible software. Maybe they want to connect them with the IT department or help filling out forms with the HR department. They can create this whole internal Be My Eyes network that would allow someone like you or me to open up the Be My Eyes app and call a private group. The first available person in that private group would be able to answer and support visually over the app. So we license these groups. We create the ability for companies to make their own Be My Eyes networks.

Shawn Maloney:

I'm just sort of thinking off the bat, and maybe this isn't a useful application or not. This is just me. This is me talking. I look at let's say my grandmother, who has a visual impairment and lives alone. The family is always wanting to be able to assist her, but can't always be there 24/7. Just having some sort of private group like that would be really cool in her case to be able to just, "Okay. Hey, who's available to help me with this? I'm trying to do X, Y, or Z and trying to keep independent living." I don't know if you've ever seen applications like that, the kind of intermediary applications between just someone using it with a large public group and the workplace. But I'm just thinking that maybe that type of thing could work as well.

Will Butler:

Yeah, we've definitely considered it. I mean, the fact of the matter is the volunteer network works so well that we've never really had to create kind of an in-between group, but people have asked for it in the past. For now, people just kind of use their own, like FaceTime or whatever, but yeah, it's definitely ... The ability to kind of create your own groups is definitely on the ideas board, for sure.

Bruno Fernandez:

So considering that it is a free service, right, for people with low vision, so I was wondering before, how can the company be financially sustainable? So I figured then now that offering that service for companies that that's how the company can have some revenue.

Will Butler:

Yeah. I mean, we are a community, but we're really a software company more than anything, and we're a pretty small crew, but we develop this software that allows companies and people in call centers to answer Be My Eyes calls directly on their computers. We license that software out to companies and organizations, nonprofits, for-profit companies, medical organizations. Anyone who wants to create their own Be My Eyes network can just log into this software on a desktop computer or a mobile device and be set up to answer the Be My Eyes calls directly. So we kind of operate like a telephone switchboard company for the blind community.

Bruno Fernandez:

That's cool.

Will Butler:

Yeah.

Shawn Maloney:

Okay. I'm going to jump in with so many questions here. So I'm going to probably combine a couple of thoughts or a few questions into one here, if that's all right.

Will Butler:

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Shawn Maloney:

You can just stay with me and my caffeine here. So I know what I've used the app for. I'm curious what some of the more common requests are that people use the app for when trying to get assistance and also if there's any stories in there of any bizarre requests that come to mind that you can speak to and maybe even some limitations, like can people get help crossing busy intersections? I'm sure there's probably some limits to what the users should be using the app for, so I was hoping you can speak to all those points.

Will Butler:

Yeah, totally. So I would say the most common thing we hear about people using the app for is probably a toss-up between reading food labels and help with clothing, probably, like color identification or pattern identification. That's actually an incredibly common one. I think a lot of people don't think that blind people have style or care about how they look, but they absolutely do, and I think there's a lot of anxiety in our community about making sure that you look good when you walk out the door. So quite a few people actually do use Be My Eyes because it's private and anonymous and you don't have to ask someone, a friend or family member, every time you're getting dressed. You can just ask a volunteer, "Hey, does this shirt match this tie, or does it complement this pair of shoes?" or whatever it is. People use that quite a bit.

Will Butler:

Then, of course, you see it in the kitchen all the time. There's this very small print on all the food items that we purchase, and whether you're blind or just have low vision, the ability to read the expiration date is, I mean, not something that everyone has. Many, many, many people have trouble reading those expiration dates, reading the ingredients on a food label. So that's an incredibly common one as well. Then moving down the list, then you see lots of tech support things, lots of people troubleshooting technology or help reading an inaccessible LED screen, like a thermostat, a heater, or an air conditioner in your home, home appliances. All of these are very, very common use cases.

Will Butler:

But then yeah, from there, you start to see the more unique ones, and this is one of the reasons why we developed specialized help, the public-facing Be My Eyes networks for companies, is because we realized that people were using Be My Eyes to ... basically using our app and volunteer eyes to troubleshoot issues that companies had designed. So we would get a big spike in calls every time Microsoft released an update to Windows, because all of these blind people were updating their computers and were struggling with some issue related to Microsoft Windows. So we thought, "Well, wouldn't it be better if Microsoft could answer these calls and help people with their Windows issues, rather than having a volunteer who doesn't know anything about it have to search for the manual and look it all up?" Yeah.

Bruno Fernandez:

Interactive also, right?

Will Butler:

Exactly. Yeah, and so Microsoft started answering calls. Similarly, same thing happened with Google. Google now answers calls for tech support. But then there are some more unique use cases that definitely created some interesting conversations. People were using Be My Eyes to read the results of their home pregnancy tests, because there's only a couple types of home pregnancy tests, and they're all visual. None of them are accessible. None of them are designed with audible feedback.

Shawn Maloney:

Maybe you don't want someone in your family network to see that, right? It might be [crosstalk 00:20:11].

Will Butler:

[crosstalk 00:20:11].

Shawn Maloney:

[crosstalk 00:20:11] someone who's anonymous to see that result first.

Will Butler:

Exactly. Yeah. For a blind woman or a couple, I mean, it's pretty mind-blowing, but blind women were never able to privately read a home pregnancy test up until just a couple years ago. It was just impossible. So we partnered up with Clear Blue, who is Procter and Gamble's pregnancy test company, and now they have a dedicated line that answers Be My Eyes calls so that women can privately and anonymously read their tests so that they can decide who to share their news with as opposed to being forced to have someone else read the results for them.

Bruno Fernandez:

For those specific partnerships, how does the user find it? Is it on the label, or is it ... I mean, let's say someone buys the pregnancy test. Does the pharmacist tell them that, "Look, you can use Be My Eyes"?

Will Butler:

Yeah. We try to work with the companies as much as possible to help them promote awareness about it. They all kind of promote it to different degrees. Some of the companies are so excited about it they print it on their business cards, whereas others are just getting into it. Clear Blue has been really good about telling the world. They'll make video campaigns, and they've talked about it publicly. There's been write-ups in the New York Times. But typically the reason companies partner with us is because we're the biggest blind community, and so it's sort of like meeting the community where they are, right? So many people already have the app in their pockets. By joining the platform, you're getting into a directory that the blind community is already looking at, so you don't need to do as much promotion as if it was another third-party video support service. I think, yeah, that's really the main reason, is you're kind of meeting people where they are.

Bruno Fernandez:

Where they need that.

Will Butler:

Yeah, we're kind of like the phone book, the Yellow Pages. I don't know if you have that in Canada, but the phone book for blind and low vision people.

Bruno Fernandez:

Do you have an idea of the geographical reach that you have in terms of countries, different languages?

Will Butler:

Yeah. I mean, I think there's only a small handful of countries which don't have free and open access to the Internet. So we're limited in some of those countries, but other than those, we're pretty much in every single country, close to 200 countries today and almost as many languages. Yeah.

Bruno Fernandez:

That's crazy. On that [inaudible 00:23:06], so what's next? How can you grow further if you took over the world already?

Will Butler:

Well, there's definitely countries and languages where we need more volunteers. One of the other things that we're working on is figuring out how to reach more blind and low vision people in those countries, because the service is free, right? So we want everyone to know that they can use it and they can use it as much as they want. So we've been spending a lot of time during the pandemic partnering with blindness and visual impairment organizations, nonprofit organizations around the world, giving them free access to our software and to Be My Eyes to build their own networks and helping them to promote the tool for their constituents in their countries. So we've brought on blindness organizations everywhere from Ireland to Nepal to many in the United States and the UK. As we start to partner with more companies and more organizations, word spreads faster, and we just kind of grow organically, word of mouth, in sort of a grassroots type of way.

Bruno Fernandez:

Yeah. We hope to do our part and help you promote the services.

Will Butler:

Oh, that's great. We love doing podcasts and stuff like this. It really does make a big difference to spread things word of mouth.

Shawn Maloney:

So on that note, before we wrap up, why don't we talk a little bit about your podcasts, because I know you have more than one on the go? I'm sure work doesn't keep you busy enough, so you decided to not start one, but not two, but three podcasts.

Will Butler:

I know. I'm insane. Yeah.

Shawn Maloney:

Tell us about those. What are you sharing? What information are you sharing in your podcasts, and where can people find those?

Will Butler:

Yeah. So the Be My Eyes Podcast is a very specific thing. It's about blindness and sight and that kind of blurry in-between area that so many of us live in. Billions of people around the world live in that in-between between blind and sighted. So the only criteria, really, is that we interview people who are blind or have low vision who are passionate about what they do. So we've talked with everyone from blind chemists to blind skateboarders to blind actors, entertainers, all sorts of people who do all sorts of things about all sorts of topics, about not just being successful in school or at work, but being successful at the grocery store or in relationships or with your therapist. It's very much about living as a visually impaired person. That's the Be My Eyes Podcast, and it's available on all the platforms.

Will Butler:

From there, we sort of spun out a couple more podcasts, which are geared slightly toward different audiences, but there's tons of overlap. We have an accessibility and inclusive design podcast called 13 Letters. That's the number one, three letters. That's the number of letters in the word accessibility. So it's all about interviewing the people who are making the world more accessible for people with visual impairments.

Will Butler:

Then we have kind of a fun one that we just launched this year called Say My Meme, which is describing the Internet's best memes for those of us who can't see them. So it's kind of like a fun cultural podcast where we get to talk about pop culture and joke around about memes. But really, it is also bringing awareness to the fact that there are so many images out there that are not employing things like alt tags and image descriptions and captions, which is such an important part of not just serving blind and visually impaired people, but making your websites more search engine-friendly and that sort of thing. So we're doing a lot on the podcast front, but you can hear it all at bemyeyes.com/podcasts.

Shawn Maloney:

Excellent.

Will Butler:

[crosstalk 00:27:15].

Shawn Maloney:

We're going to check those out for sure, and hopefully anybody who's listening to this will do that as well. Will, I want to thank you for joining us today. This is awesome. I feel like you're somebody who I want to emulate-

Will Butler:

[crosstalk 00:27:33].

Shawn Maloney:

... to be doing some really good things in the world.

Will Butler:

I really admire what you guys are doing, because connecting the dots for the medical field in eye care is so important, and the low vision community and the ophthalmological community rarely communicate with one another. We need to have more of that. So whatever I can do to support that mission, I'm all there for you guys, for sure.

Shawn Maloney:

Great, great. Well, we're going to take you up on that, too.

Will Butler:

Yeah, absolutely.

Shawn Maloney:

Will, thanks so much for joining us today. It's certainly been a pleasure.

Will Butler:

Oh, yeah. Anytime. Thank you, Shawn. Thank you, Bruno, and keep doing what you're doing. I love the show.

Bruno Fernandez:

Thank you, Will.

Will Butler:

Thanks for listening to the Be My Eyes Podcast. Go put your name in to win that eSight thing, bemyeyes.com/esight, and tune in again next week for another episode of the Be My Eyes Podcast. Thanks.

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