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Home Community Blog Visual Interpretation Without Borders: Why Accessible Technology Matters More Than Ever in Emerging Economies
April 13, 2026
340 million people are blind or have low vision. 90% of them live in emerging economies.
The global conversation around accessibility has made real progress. But it has largely been a conversation happening in wealthy countries, built around solutions priced for wealthy markets. For the vast majority of blind and low-vision people worldwide, that progress has remained out of reach, not because the need isn’t there, but because the economics don’t add up.
That gap is exactly where a tool like Be My Eyes becomes something more than an app. It becomes infrastructure.
Assistive technology has come a long way. Screen readers, magnification software, audio description tools, smart navigation apps, the ecosystem is richer than it has ever been. But much of it carries a price tag that reflects the markets it was designed for.
Much of the specialized software that makes computers and smartphones usable for people who are blind or have low-vision, require an annual license. For someone in a country where a large portion of the population lives on just a few dollars a day, that cost isn’t a barrier, it’s a wall.
Be My Eyes is free. Not free with a premium tier. Not free for a trial period. Free, with no subscription, no hidden cost, and no feature locked behind a paywall. For communities where income is inconsistent and disposable spending is limited, that distinction matters enormously.
It means a blind person anywhere in the world can get support reading a label without paying a monthly fee. It means a student with low vision can ask for assistance navigating an unfamiliar document without needing a data plan robust enough to support heavy software. It means the barrier to entry is, for once, almost nothing.
One of Be My Eyes’ most quietly powerful features is that it doesn’t require anything to exist locally. There’s no office to visit, no regional support team to call, no service that has to be built and maintained in-country before it becomes useful.
The volunteer network is global. When a blind person in Kampala opens the app and makes a call, they may connect with a sighted volunteer in London, São Paulo, or Seoul. The support doesn’t have to travel through the same infrastructure gaps that make so many other services unreliable in the global south. It just has to travel through a smartphone and a data connection.
In countries where disability support services are underfunded, where specialist organizations are few and far between, and where family members often shoulder the full weight of caregiving, that distributed network of willing strangers represents something genuinely new. A reliable, always-available tool that doesn’t depend on government budgets or local infrastructure to function.
Smartphone penetration in regions like sub-Saharan Africa has grown dramatically over the past decade, and with it, access to mobile internet. But connectivity remains inconsistent: stronger in cities, patchy in rural areas, and variable even in urban centers depending on the time of day or the provider.
Be My Eyes is designed to be lean. It doesn’t require a high-end device. It doesn’t demand a fast or stable connection to be useful. A basic Android smartphone, a modest data plan, or even just using local free wi-fi are enough. Be My Eyes calls work perfectly with as little as a 3.0 Mbps connection. The app meets people where they are, rather than asking them to upgrade their situation before they can access support.
Perhaps the most underappreciated dimension of Be My Eyes in emerging economies is what happens when someone who uses it becomes an advocate for it.
Accessible technology doesn’t spread itself. In communities where digital literacy is still growing and where awareness of access tools is limited, the most powerful distribution channel is a person: someone who has used the app, understands it, and can demonstrate it to others.
This is already happening. Blind individuals who discover Be My Eyes aren’t just using it quietly. They’re showing it to their families, their neighbors, their communities. They’re signing family members up as volunteers. They’re incorporating it into trainings. They’re building local awareness networks that no marketing campaign could replicate.
An example is Cristofer Ojok, an inclusion facilitator from Uganda who is traveling across his country to teach blind people about accessible technology, and how Be My Eyes became his most powerful tool in the classroom. We have recently shared his story as part of our “Can You Top This?” contest, and you can find it at this link.
None of this means Be My Eyes has solved the accessibility gap in the emerging economies. Smartphone access is still uneven. Digital literacy remains a real barrier. And awareness (the basic knowledge that tools like this exist) is still the first and most persistent obstacle.
But what Be My Eyes represents is a model: a solution that is free, global, language-flexible, low-bandwidth, and immediately useful. A solution that scales not through expensive infrastructure but through human connection. In the context of a world where 90% of people who are blind or have low vision live in places that have historically been last in line for accessible technology, that model is worth paying attention to, and worth spreading.
