Trust and Safety of Human- and AI-Powered Visual Description: A Case Study of Be My Eyes

Abstract

Be My Eyes provides a volunteer-powered visual description service that connects over one million blind and low vision users with more than ten million volunteers for everyday visual assistance tasks as well as Be My AI, an AI-powered counterpart. In this work, we qualitatively analyze 1,428 one-, two-, and three-star reviews from the Apple App Store and Google Play Store to holistically examine the concerns and harmful experiences of both users and volunteers. Our analysis surfaces online harassment and abuse (trolling, cyberflashing, reporting failures), privacy concerns beyond information exposure (data use for model training), and accessibility/safety problems (inaccurate descriptions, paternalistic guardrails). We additionally analyze platform policies to examine whether and how these issues are addressed by them. Based on challenges we find related to accessibility, security, privacy, and AI, we provide recommendations for strengthening trust and safety on visual description services that serve blind and low vision people’s access needs.