Egyptian student Mark Mourad, who lost his sight during his high school years, taught himself programming to develop ScribeMe, a software application designed to help blind students navigate academic diagrams and science coursework. Mourad discussed his journey and the decision to make the app free in Egypt during an appearance on the ON channel program hosted by Mona El-Shazly.
When Mourad reached his third year of secondary school, he resolved to study independently to ease the daily burden on his father, who returned from work exhausted. Yet his coursework in physics and chemistry presented an unexpected wall. Standard screen-reading software could not interpret the geometric diagrams and graphs embedded in the texts, often simply stating the word “image” without explaining the visual data.
Rather than fall behind, Mourad turned his personal academic obstacle into an engineering problem. That decision birthed ScribeMe, a tool that has since scaled internationally while shifting its distribution model at home.
From Isolation to Late-Night Coding Sessions
The path to development grew out of deep personal disruption. Following his vision loss, Mourad lost touch with many of his peers and had to give up hobbies like playing PlayStation, leaving him with long stretches of empty time at home.
When I lost my sight I lost all my friends, and I couldn’t play PlayStation, so I had a lot of free time and I sat at home for a long time, and I got so bored and upset while I was bored, and I tried to make use of that time to learn programming alongside studying. Mark Mourad, via Almasryalyoum
Working through the night until 3:00 or 4:00 AM, Mourad taught himself through auditory learning on YouTube and Google searches. His father, engineer Mourad Sedky, recalled discovering that his son was independently managing complex code blocks of 500 to 600 lines, debugging and resolving errors on his own shortly after picking up the language.
Developing ScribeMe and Reaching International Users
What began as a personal computer project to help Mourad study soon drew attention from outside Egypt. Blind students abroad requested access to the tool, prompting the development team to release a mobile version equipped with features designed to describe the surrounding world to users.
Initially, the app carried a subscription fee of USD 20 per month—roughly 1,000 Egyptian pounds—intended to cover operational costs and secure financial sustainability. The pricing strategy was tailored toward external markets in the United States and Europe, where early metrics surprised the family by showing steady subscription notifications.
However, subsequent attempts to offer a reduced domestic rate of 150 Egyptian pounds monthly still proved burdensome for some local families. Mourad ultimately decided to make the application entirely free for blind users and citizens in Egypt.
Family Resilience and Higher Education Goals
The family dynamic played a central role in how the household handled the diagnosis. Sedky noted that the family of four agreed not to yield to frustration, with his wife continuing her studies in fashion design while Mourad refused to suspend his academic year to avoid changing his educational environment.
That refusal to step back from his education characterized Mourad's broader trajectory.
By removing financial barriers for domestic users, Mourad fulfilled a personal promise to extend assistance to others facing similar hurdles, transforming a solitary struggle with high school physics and chemistry into a widely accessible digital platform.
