You're listening to a Community Story from Be My Eyes.


My name is Parham, and I'm originally from Iran. I moved to the Netherlands four years ago, and since then I've been working at booking.com as an engineering team lead during the day. I'm able to see the light only, so I can't really use my sight to read or look or discern colors. I can only see the light and the lack of it. I got to know Be My Eyes four years ago, when I moved to the Netherlands. I and my wife are both blind, so we basically moved to a country that was far from family and friends, and we had a social circle of zero. Be My Eyes helped me a lot in that time period, for when I wanted to use any touch screen devices like the thermostats, induction hobs, or when I wanted to check stuff on the oven or the coffee machine wasn't working, all of that. These were things that normally I would use a friend or a neighbor or a family member to help, but since I didn't really know anyone in the first six months or so, Be My Eyes helped me a lot in getting the everyday tasks done.


When we moved to the Netherlands, initially, we had a temporary accommodation that booking.com provided while we started searching for an apartment, and we had basically one of my colleagues coming in and showing us how to use the washing machine and the oven and all of that. I remember my wife was asking this colleague, "So what temperature should I put the washing machine at?" And then my colleague was asking, "Wait haven't you used a washing machine before?" My wife was, "No, it's the first time we were living by ourselves in a house, just alone". That was the first moment that we realized, wow, there's a lot that we need to learn and a lot that we need to figure out how to do.


Throughout that time, we started looking at apartments without actually being able to see, which was not something that we would ever imagined we would get to do. Then in the meantime, while we were waiting for the local organization for the blind to give us the training to walk around and how you do it in Europe and what the rules and regulations are, basically, we had to get around anyway. We used Be My Eyes a lot in those early days to basically be like, "Yeah, where am I? I feel kind of lost", and Google Maps isn't working. The ability to be able to call people who are Dutch was really helpful, because they could read the street signs and they could sometimes say, "Hey, can you ask the person close by where you are, because I can't really see it from your camera?" That was really helpful. I think this is a level of service that we wouldn't get from any paid service, because the community is not as broad as Be My Eyes. That was one of the things that helped us a lot in the beginning.


Back when I came to the Netherlands, we didn't really have many options for scanning letters, and we used to get a lot of letters. The situation has gotten a lot better now with Envision and Seeing AI, but I used to get these letters and I wasn't able to actually read what they said. After I'd even got a software to read it, I didn't really understand what it said, because it wasn't really easy at the time to translate it. So one of the things that I used to do, back in the day, was call a Be My Eyes volunteer and say, "Can you basically just read and translate what this thing is trying to say?" This goes beyond the fact that I wasn't able to see the letters. Being able to ask a Dutch person more context on, "Well, what's the next step, because the letter is confusing. Do you, maybe, know who I should get in touch with to know more about this?"


I got to know a lot about the Dutch, the way that the Dutch do things in a really short time, because I had access to the volunteers. And part of this was the fact that they read stuff to me and translated it, but also a large part of it was that I could ask them for advice. That basically helped me get up to speed with that stuff a lot faster than my colleagues, because they didn't have access to volunteers.


When you have access to Be My Eyes, you actually don't realize how much you depend on it. When I went to Iran, I don't remember exactly what it is I wanted to do, but I was like, "Oh yeah, this is easy. I'll just reach out to Be My Eyes and then they can just help me out." Be My Eyes, is actually censored in Iran, so we don't really have access to be able to call. It was then that I realized, "Oh, wow, I really depend on Be My Eyes a lot." I basically just had to do it the old fashioned way, which was wait for someone or look for someone to help me out.


Iran is one of those countries where your parents stuff your suitcases and bags full of things to eat. So, when we came back to the Netherlands, we now had all these frozen products and we didn't really know what is what, because it's all frozen. What we did at the time was, we set our language to Persian, which is the language that's spoken in Iran, and we didn't really expect to get a Persian speaking volunteer because, well, first of all, it's censored in Iran, but also the fact that there's just not many people signing up to these kinds of services. But then we got someone who was living in the UK, and she spoke Farsi and she basically helped us figure out, "Oh yeah, this is the vegetables that you would use for this kind of food. These are like, I don't know, fried eggplant that you can use in this other kind of food" and stuff like that. That basically helped us sort out our freezer super fast in like five minutes. That actually gave me the idea that sometimes when I get groceries delivered, I sometimes use Be My Eyes to more quickly figure out what something is. Right now you can use other apps to scan the barcode, but that doesn't always work because not all the barcodes exist in the database of the application. When we have really large orders and we want to quickly sort of things out and label them and put them in the freezer, I still just call Be My Eyes because that's just a lot faster.


When we bought our current apartment, our neighbors gave us an electric grill for the balcony. This is a Weber grill, so I went to the Weber website and I started ordering its parts, like the stand and different kinds of tongs for picking things up and stuff like that. When the base or the table arrived, I was expecting it to be in one piece, but it arrived in multiple bits and pieces, and you had to put it together. Kind of like Ikea, but a lot simpler, but it was still like disconnected pieces.


There was like a really easy schema explaining, this goes there and then you connect this to that, but it was all visual and I couldn't see it. So, I just called Be My Eyes and I was like, "Hey, can you look at the schema on this piece of paper and let me know how I should assemble this base?" The person that I got on the line was super helpful. He basically was like, "Yeah, maybe you need to do that. No, that doesn't work. Okay, so turn that around. Okay. Now that clicked into place. Great. Move on to that..." He even told me, "Oh yeah, if you can't assemble it, I am actually close by. Where do you live? I can actually come there with my car and help you assemble it." Fortunately, I actually got to assemble it in that call, but it gave me a really warm and fuzzy feeling to know that people are watching out and are willing to help you, even to drive by if you're stuck to help you out. These are complete strangers, so that was a really cool experience.


One thing that I do often on Be My Eyes is try to socialize with people that I get to talk with while I'm waiting for things to happen. I actually got to know a couple of friends through Be My Eyes. We became friends and we exchanged LinkedIn profiles during the call, and then I got in touch with them. Two of them are professional acquaintances that I keep in touch with and basically exchange information. I also got to meet by therapist there. She had just moved to the Netherlands and she was looking for clients to basically start her base of therapy in the Netherlands, and I got to become her very first client. We've been working together for like a year and a half now.


Sometimes at work, I have to use applications or do things where the problem is not just necessarily knowing what's on the screen. It's not like something that I can just point my phone at and say, "Hey, can you scan what my screen says and tell me." It's very contextual. So for example, there's a table of information or the colors are important. Something is in a different color and that means something to a human, but not to machine. This is something that I use Be My Eyes for a lot, where the thing that I'm looking at is not necessarily the text, it's also the icons, the colors, the relation of different bits and pieces of texts together.


Like for example, my coffee machine sometimes stops working, and then we have to look at why it's not working. If I point a phone at it, it won't really tell me anything because it has icons on the screen and stuff like that, where it's something that you can't just take a photo of or scan and just have it read out loud to you. These are cases that I just rely on Be My Eyes, because a human can just look at those icons and be like, "Oh, okay. I have some theories about what could be wrong. Let's test them out." Because sometimes the icons don't even make sense to a human. It's great to have them basically tell you their ideas or maybe brainstorm on what could be wrong, and then just go from there.


Something that happens often when I reach out to friends and family for help, and the reason I'm not really comfortable doing that, is that I start leaning on specific people for specific things. And then what ends up happening is that I feel like I'm putting a lot of load on this person, because now they have to juggle the fact that I need a document signed with their own everyday work as well. Sometimes this is super fast and this person does it super quickly and I do that, but it's also great to have an option not to do it for things where speed is not that important. One thing that Be My Eyes allows me to do is giving me a community of people so that I'm not really worried about that the last two weeks, I've reached out to this person 10 times asking stuff. It basically spreads the load between multiple people and that helps me a lot in reaching out more often instead of saying, "Oh, no. Let me figure this out somehow, because I don't want to annoy that other person."


Now it's, especially with the Siri shortcut, I can just say, "Call volunteer," and it's as easy as that. Then it's really easy for me to do things that, especially in this time where we are at home and my largest area of asking for help would, without Be My Eyes, would be my colleagues, but now in that area in a time where we're all at home, it basically means that I can do everything without being worried about, I can't ask people to come over. It's not safe for me, and it's not safe for them. Now I can ask for help in an unlimited way, which is awesome.


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