Also, something else that bothers me a bit about lots of the comments in this thread:

It's nice that people want to keep things free and to avoid the influence that money might bring to a thing. But the unfortunate reality is that we live in a society that doesn't let me buy groceries, beer or housing with goodwill. Sure, help is a good thing, and I'm the last person who wants to live in a society where our interactions are commoditized. But there's a cost for the convenience of near-instantly beaming that help to your phone/desktop/smart glasses. Put simply, I'm just as much a consumer as are you, and I think that regarding services like these as something that should be given away for free is a big reason there's next to zero innovation in how I as a blind person interact with my world.

Put more practically, I've probably spent ~$100 on audio-only games in the course of my lifetime (would likely be more, I'm just not a huge gamer.) Additionally, I've purchased Twitter clients, book readers and other apps specifically designed to be highly accessible because their mainstream equivalents aren't, or their accessibility implementations are laughably bad (see Kindle for PC, which I'd rather crack Kindle content than use.) We're here, we're buying things, and while there's certainly a large segment of the community that will vocally complain if things aren't free, we're happy to fund new innovation for folks who can deliver something beyond another currency/color identifier or minor screen reader iteration.

There are various ways to segment customers to extract money from those who can afford it, while offering low-cost or free services to those who cannot.

We need companies like this to have high cash flow, so they can hire top developers and create jobs where an engineer's daily work goes directly to improve human quality of life.

I'd like it if this would force you to pay based on how long something was going to take. I want to install freenas in a virtual machine so I can test the web interface accessibility before spending the money on a server to run it. I'd gladly pay $10 or $15 to have someone walk me through the install by me pointing my phone at my laptop screen if that were possible but don't want to ask someone who's expecting to spend 30 seconds reading a label spend 30 minutes walking me through an OS install instead.

Off-topic, but what audio-only games can you recommend?

I don't know the answer to your question but it should be a required exercise for every web developer to use their website with a screen reader and a blindfold. It would change the way they/we build websites.

I would submit an issue to HN to fix their accessibility – there is no excuse (for HN) not to.

Edit: Sentence subject-ambiguity clarification.

I expect that using a screen reader and a blindfold would take some considerable time to get effective at, even for accessible sites.

As for the sites I am responsible for, I try to make them accessible by reading and applying the guidelines, but I do appreciate feedback from blind people on ways to improve it for them.

That would be stupid for most sites - only a small minority of customers are blind and it isn't worth changing the entire site for them (unless you are amazon or you get it for free by using standard HTML things like links, buttons, etc).

And before you scream ADA, that is a) nationalistic (not all web developers are in the US) b) usually something that can be worked around - e.g. put your phone number on the site as an alternative.

Accomodating people with disabilities is an ethical issue, not a numbers game.

> I don't know the answer to your question but it should be a required exercise for every web developer to use their website with a screen reader and a blindfold. It would change the way they/we build websites.

Really ? Are you going to ask every developer as well to try to use a website by binding their arms as well, to see how mutilated people feel about the navigation ?

There are good cases for adapting designs to make it usable to most people, and there are good cases as well where the people with disabilities need to have tools to access what's not made for them in the first place.

Ah yes, cross platform video. The bane of anyone who has ever worked with videoconferencing systems. If you're still working on it (ditto for the authors of Be My Eyes) it may be worth getting in touch with someone along the lines of Pexip[1] to see if they're interested in assisting with infrastructure and handling of media so that it's possible to focus on wrapping that is some beautiful UX for this use case.

[1] http://pexip.com/

For completeness sake, I'd like to note that the OP doesn't seem to be cross-platform.

Hmm, the reply button to submit this comment is just reachable with tab as it should be, so I don't see any issues there?

Have you looked at something like BigBlueButton? I recently used it to give a webinar. They don't have an HTML 5 client yet unfortunately, but they integrate some interesting things to provide video/audio over WebRTC and to their Flash client. I think it uses Freeswitch for the audio/video part.

If you nail the technical issues, you might find that lots of blindies are not that good videographers. You need a high quality stream and preferably a method to let the remote party control the camera zoom. I use "remote eyes" in various situations and had quite some issues focussing my camera in the beginning. I use USB camera glasses or a smartphone, usually just through a Skype connection.

Does anybody have any market data, at least or the US? E.g., are there enough visually impaired people to sustain such a service, e.g., for $20-50/month? Can Medicare/Medicaid cover part of the costs?

TIL blind people use smileys.