Meta says it's offering free smart glasses to every legally blind US veteran, with more than 130,000 eligible.

The company says it will also "provide hands-on training with every single pair", in partnership with the Blinded Veterans Association and TechSoup. That will include a training guide, monthly webinars for all, as well as in-person events "across the country".

Meta says the donation program was championed by US Army veteran Don Overton, who lost his eyesight in the Gulf War. Overton says putting on smart glasses gave him his "independence back".

“These veterans sacrificed their sight in service to our country. Giving them technology that can meaningfully navigate the world around them is a profound honor for us and underscores the importance of why we build”, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth said in a prepared statement.

The technology Bosworth refers to is the visual capabilities of Meta AI, which uses the camera on the glasses to capture an image when responding to queries relating to something in the wearer's view. This can include advanced queries, or more basic requests like identifying objects and reading out text.

Last year, Meta added a Detailed Responses accessibility option, which makes Meta AI on the glasses provide a much more verbose description for visual queries. It's specifically designed for people with vision impairment, and thus the guidance for blind US veterans will likely start by explaining how to enable the setting.

The guidance should also hopefully note that the large language model (LLM) technology that makes chatbots like Meta AI possible is prone to error, as even Meta's terms warn against relying on it for any safety-critical tasks.

Additionally, Meta has a partnership with Be My Eyes, which lets blind and low-vision Ray-Ban Meta glasses wearers start a view-sharing video call with one of the service's 8 million volunteers who help them navigate a situation.

Legally blind US veterans can request their free pair of Ray-Ban Meta glasses at bva.org/glasses.