Executive Summary

• BLV community online is very well interconnected by appears relatively small online; Despite promisingly high numbers from published studies, Netnography causes doubt on the scale the blind & low-vision people who use the internet;
  • Hypothesis 1: BLV people use internet exactly the same as rest of the population - rarely or never searching or following blind-ness related content or tools. Therefore it’s impossible to identify them based on interests, consumed media or visited websites.
  • Hypothesis 2: BLV people use internet at much lower rates than sighted people. They are easily spotted but their population online is < 1mln.
• Be My Eyes (as well as similar apps, i.e. letsenvision) is much closer to technology segment, that to disability segment. The messaging, brand and channels primarily appeal to tech enthusiasts or tech evangelists, with a lot of cross-audience with Elon Musk, NASA, scientific American, The Wall Street Journal (or even GitHub, Leetcode, Docker). It gathers interest from technology perspective but not as an actual tool for the BLV individuals.

Methods:

I’ve performed research using the following techniques:

1. Data re-analysis from BME, including App & Web Analytics, as well as all provided decks, research briefs, interviews and so on.
2. Network Analysis of:
   1. SimilarWeb website similarity for the blind space (N>1000)
   2. BLV-related Twitter accounts (N>3000).
3. Review of existing research papers, whitepapers, publications and so on about BLV individuals online

Findings:

1. External research is extremely inconclusive about blind people online

I’ve reviewed 10+ papers focusing on online/digital/mobile-related behaviors and adoption by blind and low-vision individuals. I’ve found no comprehensive metanalysis on this topic.

I’ve found that the research is extremely circumstantial and the core variability is sampling method. As far as I’m able to determine, most of the research is essentially meaningless due to poor sampling practices and low variety of sampling.

On the right just a few tip-of-the-iceberg examples of how inconstant research is into blind communities.

https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey7/ → 60% blind people advanced screen-reader users

https://webaim.org/projects/lowvisionsurvey2/ → 70% report advanced internet proficiency

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33760680/ - > 47% blind people have access to a smartphone but have extremely low tech knowledge

https://www.deque.com/blog/research-shows-internet-is-unavailable-to-blind-users/ → blind people try to use the internet but vast majority give up due to low accessibility

https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1149519.pdf → 95% of blind and low-vision respondents use smart-phones and most are very proficient

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/266655702_Visually_impaired_users_on_an_online_social_network → blind people use of social media almost no different from general population

2 - search volumes for blindness-specific terms are relatively low. :

Keywords around “help low-vision” or “app for blind people” generally have <1k searches each month; Per AnswerThePublic, 99% of searches involving keyword “blind” have nothing to do with low-vision individuals at all. Relevant long-string keywords likely could add-up to around

While Screen Readers have relatively high monthly volumes, they’re the only high-volume search term in the space, potentially pointing to lack of awareness of other types of accessibility tools.

Some sample search terms and their search volumes on Google on the right.

2.2 BME (and similar apps) primarily attracts tech optimists and community-seekers*

*This trend is exaggerated after ChatGPT3 launch! In previous month, the tech audience was still a reasonable part of userbase but not nearly as dominant.

When analyzing data both internal and external, we see an abnormally large amount of tech users and references to technology journalism sites;

While often blind people often get mislabeled as “technology enthusiasm” due to their search for accessibility tools, with BME specifically we see an extreme amount of overlap with sites like tech journalism, tech news, AI news and major news-resharing sights; Even letsenvision, which is the most relevant site to BME per SimilarWeb, gets majority of its traffic due to VR and AR-related news, rather than from anyone with low-vision.

My understnading is that the heavy PR coverage of BME has focused on technological optimism and carried a message that was inspiring and exciting to volunteers but lacked clear USPs and clarity for the blind users.

3. No clear digital spaces for blind and low-vision people