The 20-year-old Mark Morad, who developed the AI-powered ScribeMe app.
A free smartphone app built by a blind Egyptian teenager is helping thousands of visually impaired users around the world navigate daily life, from crossing a busy street to describing a herd of elephants on safari.
The app, called ScribeMe, was created by 20-year-old Mark Sedky, who lost his sight to a rare, incurable optic nerve condition. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) to generate a running audio description of a user’s surroundings, captured either through a phone’s camera or, more recently, through Meta’s smart glasses, freeing up a user’s hands to hold a cane.
The app’s most vivid demonstration came in June, when Mark’s younger sister Karen, 16, who also lost her sight five years ago, used it on a family holiday in Kenya. Wearing the AI-linked glasses, she received a continuous commentary on the animals around her, how far away they were and what they were doing, letting her piece together scenes she could no longer see for herself.
“I always thought this would be impossible to happen, but it did and I could truly see,” she told news agency Reuters.
Mark’s vision problems began in 2018. Doctors in Egypt and abroad could not offer a definitive diagnosis beyond warning that he would eventually go blind, with no way of knowing when. Both siblings had lost their sight completely by late 2021, with Karen losing it within six months and Mark over nearly three years.
Schoolwork proved one of the hardest adjustments. Existing screen-reading tools went silent whenever Mark tried to study physics and chemistry, unable to describe charts, diagrams or equations. After developers of similar tools abroad did not respond to his emails, Mark taught himself to code from YouTube tutorials and had a working prototype by 2023.
The project gained momentum after Mark won recognition at Vodafone Egypt’s 2024 AI Assistive Tools Hackathon, which brought him a co-founder and pushed the app beyond simple document-scanning.
According to its developers, ScribeMe now answers real-time spoken questions through a phone’s camera, supports around 20 languages, including Arabic, a gap Mark has said he found in every rival product. It also offers optical character recognition in more than 50 languages for reading documents and presentations.
It is available free on iPhone and Android, with paid tiers at USD 20 a month or USD 200 a year unlocking additional features, and is now used across some 140 countries.
For Karen, the app has become part of daily routine, helping her locate her classroom, identify shops, pick out clothes and study. “Dreams grow, they grow, and we, as a family, stopped saying anything is impossible,” their father, Morad Sedky, told Reuters.
This post was last modified on August 18, 2026 6:57 pm