Blind Egyptian entrepreneur builds AI app that describes the world through audio

When Karen Morad, a 16-year-old student from Cairo, underwent a Kenyan safari in June 2026, she encountered something seemingly impossible: "seeing" the surrounding wildlife despite her complete blindness. This remarkable experience was made possible by ScribeMe, an AI-driven application developed by her brother Mark, who also suffers from blindness.

This extraordinary tale, originally reported by Reuters, illustrates how personal adversity, self-taught coding skills, and advanced assistive technology can empower thousands of visually impaired individuals, offering them newfound independence.

Mark Morad (also recognized as Mark Sedky in an Enterprise.com report) began losing his vision in 2018 due to a rare, incurable optic nerve disorder. By late 2021, he and his sister Karen had become completely blind. During his school years, Mark faced significant challenges: screen readers useful for reading texts would fail to function when encountering charts, diagrams, and equations in physics and chemistry, leaving him reliant on assistance for visual information.

After encountering no response from overseas developers, he taught himself to code through YouTube tutorials and, by 2023, had created a functioning prototype.

Initially conceived as a tool to "read" academic visuals, the app transformed into ScribeMe—a specialized application catered to the needs of the completely blind. The app's development earned Mark accolades in technology contests, including the Vodafone AI Assistive Tools Hackathon in 2024, which facilitated the recruitment of a co-founder and expanded the app's functionalities beyond document scanning.

Currently, ScribeMe is utilized by thousands of individuals across 140 nations and supports approximately 20 languages, including Arabic—a gap identified by Mark as a deficiency in competing tools.

How ScribeMe operates is straightforward yet ingenious. Leveraging AI and computer vision, the app analyzes what the phone's camera or Meta smart glasses capture and then delivers an audible description of the scene. For users like Karen, this translates into a continuous narration of details such as the presence of objects or animals, their distance, and their actions, effectively enabling them to mentally construct the scene and perceive the surrounding atmosphere.

During her trip to Kenya, Karen utilized the app via Meta smart glasses, which allowed her to maintain her hands free to hold a cane while simultaneously receiving constant audio feedback regarding her surroundings.

Beyond providing descriptions of the environment, the app also answers real-time queries through the phone's camera and offers optical character recognition in over 50 languages, facilitating the reading of documents and presentations. In Karen's daily routine, ScribeMe aids her in navigating to her classroom, identifying shops, selecting appropriate attire, and pursuing her studies more independently.

The seamless integration with Meta's wearable glasses is particularly advantageous for mobility, enabling blind users to navigate autonomously while keeping one hand available for a cane or other support.

In terms of pricing, ScribeMe is accessible as a free download on both iPhone and Android platforms, with advanced features available through a fixed subscription of $20 per month or $200 per year. The annual plan effectively reduces the monthly cost to around $16.67 when paid upfront, according to recent reports on the app's pricing structure.

The app's multilingual support, encompassing approximately 20 languages including Arabic, addresses a significant accessibility gap for non-English speakers who rely on audio descriptions to interact with digital and physical environments.

For families such as the Morads, the impact of ScribeMe extends far beyond its features and pricing. Mark's father, Morad Sedky, expressed that if someone had predicted four years prior where his children would be today, he would have dismissed it as unrealistic. "Dreams grow, they grow, and we, as a family, stopped saying anything is impossible," he emphasized; a sentiment that now resonates across the 140 countries where ScribeMe is enabling visually impaired users to perceive the world through sound.