Accessibility · Ordinary People
The Cairo student who taught himself to code after losing his sight, then built the app that let his sister see her own safari
Mark Morad, Bishoy Michael · Cairo, Egypt
After losing his sight, Mark Morad taught himself to program by screen reader alone and built ScribeMe so no one would have to describe the world to him again. When his sister Karen lost her sight to the same rare disease, she used it to watch a safari unfold.
The person and the place
Mark Morad, 20, a student at the American University in Cairo. His sight had been fading since 2018 from a rare, incurable optic nerve condition with no clear timeline. His younger sister Karen's vision failed faster, and by late 2021 they were both completely blind.
The problem he cared about
His screen reader could read the words on a page, but went silent the moment a physics or chemistry lesson turned to a chart or a diagram. Explaining every image to him fell to whoever happened to be nearby.
The agency moment
"I didn't like that someone always had to explain these documents to me. So I got the idea of creating an app to solve this problem." He had never coded before. He taught himself from YouTube tutorials, working entirely through a screen reader, and had a working version of ScribeMe within five months.
What changed, with evidence
Morad's app now points a phone camera, or a pair of Meta smart glasses, at the world and describes out loud what's there, in 20 languages. He runs it today with co-founder Bishoy Michael, and the company reports thousands of users across 140 countries. The clearest evidence of what it actually does: in June 2026, Karen took it on a family safari in Kenya. "I always thought this would be impossible to happen – but it did and I could truly see."
Where it led
A gap he built to close for himself, homework nobody could describe to him, is now closing for his sister, on a different continent, over an entirely different kind of picture. He didn't need permission to start, only YouTube and a screen reader. Know someone else stuck describing the world to somebody else, one document at a time? Feed the scout at goodinprogress.org.
"I always thought this would be impossible to happen – but it did and I could truly see." — Karen Morad, quoted in Reuters
Sources
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Curated by Good in Progress from the public record.
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