Ten Seed Packets and a Stranger from Toronto

One April, in Langley, British Columbia, Reed Poynter received ten packets of seeds for his garden. He is totally blind. He wanted to sort them and put a braille label on each one.

He started a video call in an app. On the other side of the country, a woman in Toronto answered. She was sitting in her cement truck, waiting for something to happen at the job site.

Through the phone's camera, she helped him. They had never met.

Another stranger guided him to the door of a building. Yet another came to the rescue when his white cane slipped out of his belt while he was exercising outdoors at home. Reed Poynter told these moments in a letter addressed to "dear strangers," published by CBC.

The app is called Be My Eyes. It was born in Denmark. Its founder, Hans Jørgen Wiberg, is a furniture craftsman. He is visually impaired himself.

One day, a blind friend told him he asked family and friends for help over video calls. Wiberg then imagined a network of volunteers, ready to answer.

He presented his idea in April 2012, at a startup event in Aarhus. The app launched on January 15, 2015. Within 24 hours, it had more than 10,000 users.

The goodwill was already there. It just needed a path.

In March 2026, Be My Eyes passed one million blind and low-vision users. Better still: ten million volunteers are signed up, in more than 150 countries. Together, they speak more than 180 languages.

Since 2023, artificial intelligence can also describe a photo. But the volunteers still answer. To help, you don't need a degree. A phone and a few minutes are enough. Even a break in a cement truck.

Today, October 8, is World Sight Day. This year, it shines a light on the power of people and community action.

A machine can isolate us, or bring us close to a stranger for the time it takes to sort ten seed packets. We see better together: perhaps that is Ubuntu in the age of screens.