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Home From Fear to the Field: How One Man Is Bringing Be My Eyes to Uganda
March 3, 2026
Christopher didn’t set out to become an ambassador for accessible technology. He just wanted to do his job well. But somewhere between a two-week training tour across five Ugandan districts and a crowd of participants who couldn’t stop clapping, something shifted.
Christopher is an inclusion facilitator based in Northern Uganda. His day-to-day work involves helping organizations design programs and physical environments that are truly accessible to people with disabilities. He guides institutions on inclusive policy, connects them with the right authorities, and helps them see what they’ve been missing.
When a colleague had to back out of a two-week digital access training program and recommended Christopher as a replacement, he said yes, and then quietly started to wonder what, exactly, he would teach. He knew the essentials: JAWS, the screen reading software widely used across Uganda; hardware and software basics; the landscape of tools that give blind people access to computers and smartphones. But he wanted something more. Something that would show people, in real time, that independence was possible.
That’s when he returned to an app he’d downloaded years earlier and set aside: Be My Eyes.
Finding Be My Eyes the first time had been accidental. Christopher had been searching the Google Play Store and the app appeared among the results. He read about it, downloaded it, explored it. And then he stopped.
“I started fearing using it,” he says plainly.
His first call had hit a snag. He’d urgently needed someone to read a form. He connected with a volunteer, but his phone’s camera wouldn’t cooperate. The call fell apart before it could help. And that experience cast a long shadow.
It’s a feeling many blind users know. The fear of the first call, of not knowing quite what to expect, of technology letting you down at exactly the wrong moment, can be enough to make someone set the app aside and not come back. For Christopher, that gap lasted years.
What changed wasn’t the app. It was a deadline, an opportunity, and two days of deliberate exploration.
With the training assignment ahead of him, Christopher gave Be My Eyes a real chance. He tested it methodically. He learned how the volunteer network worked, what the rating system looked like, how to frame a request clearly. By the time he arrived in the field, he wasn’t just familiar with it. He was fluent.
During his work as a facilitator, Christopher toured five districts, traveling more than 300 kilometers from north to west and back. Each district got two days. Each session included not just people who are blind or have low vision, but local government officials as well, who needed to understand what accessible technology actually looks like in practice.
That’s intentional. Awareness, Christopher believes, has to reach everyone, not just the people who will use the tools, but the people who design systems, allocate resources, and write policy. If only blind people know these tools exist, the ecosystem stays small. If government and community leaders understand them, the door opens wider.
He’s fond of a particular phrase: the higher the supply, the higher the demand. He wants more volunteers, more users, more people who understand that Be My Eyes is free, that it doesn’t require a subscription, that it works in places where expensive assistive technology is out of reach. Across Uganda. Across the continent. Across the world.
“We just need to create more awareness,” he says, “across the nation, across the continent, more about Be My Eyes.”
For other blind people who haven’t yet made their first call, Christopherr’s message is direct.
“Let’s believe that we can make it.”
He’s not dismissive of dependence: there are moments when we all need support. But he draws a clear line between needing support and not believing you’re capable of doing things yourself. Technology, he argues, is what makes the difference between those two things. A blind person with the right tools and knowledge can navigate the world more independently. Without that knowledge, the world stays inaccessible, not because of blindness, but because of the gap in information.
The fear of the first call is real. So is the moment on the other side of it, when a volunteer’s voice comes through clearly and something that felt impossible suddenly isn’t.
