From braille to Be My Eyes – there's a revolution happening in tech for the blind

"Connected to other part," my iPhone says to me as I stand somewhere in London's Soho, trying to decipher the letter on the top of a bus stop. "Hello?" says an American woman, reminding me of Scarlett Johansson's disembodied artificially intelligent character from the sci-fi film Her. "Hey, er … can you give me a hand by reading the letter on the bus stop?" "Sure … can you move your phone a bit more up, and to the left … Ya! I thank her, end the session, pull up Citymapper and navigate my way onto the 453 going to New Cross. I have a little bit of vision, but only enough to see motion and movement. I am using an app called Be My Eyes, an app that connects blind and visually impaired people to sighted volunteers via a remote video connection. Through the phone's camera, the blind person is able to show the sighted individual what they are looking at in the real world, allowing the volunteer to assist them with any of their vision-related problems. I began to lose my sight in the summer of 2013 to a rare genetic mitochondrial disease called Leber's hereditary optic neuropathy and was soon registered blind. I consequently found myself relying on an assortment of assistive technologies to do the simplest of tasks. Be My Eyes has just over 35,000 visually-impaired users registered for the app and over half a million volunteers. Whenever a visually impaired user requests assistance a sighted volunteer receives a notification and a video connection is established. Jose Ranola, a 55-year-old from the Philippines who works in construction and has retinitis pigmentosa, said: "I use it to help me identify medicine and read printed materials and also to describe places and objects." He adds: "All my experiences were good.