ScribeMe — Blind-Founded AI Visual-Description App from Cairo, Now Used in 140 Countries

Mark Morad lost his sight completely in late 2021, after vision problems that began in 2018. Existing screen readers could not describe the charts, diagrams and equations in his physics and chemistry textbooks, and when developers of similar tools abroad did not respond to his emails, he taught himself to code from YouTube tutorials. He had a working prototype, ScribeMe, by 2023.
In 2024, Morad won Vodafone Egypt's AI Assistive Tools Hackathon, which brought him a co-founder and helped ScribeMe grow beyond document scanning into an app that answers real-time spoken questions about a scene captured through a phone or Meta smart-glasses camera. As of August 2026, wire reporting carried by outlets including Arab News, TimesLIVE and The Star put usage at 'thousands' of users across 140 countries and 20 languages, including Arabic. The app is free to download, with optional paid features at $20/month or $200/year.
These figures come from a single syndicated news feature rather than an independent audit, and no third-party accuracy or usability evaluation of ScribeMe's AI descriptions has been published; as with any AI-generated scene description for blind users, misdescriptions carry real safety implications that have not yet been externally assessed.

Read the full analysis: https://www.arabnews.com/node/2655106/media