Necessity may be the mother of invention. Frustration occasionally deserves a little credit too.
When Egyptian student Mark Morad lost his sight, the screen-reading software he depended on could handle text but often failed him when his lessons reached charts, diagrams, and equations.
So he taught himself to code.
The result became ScribeMe, an AI-assisted accessibility tool that can describe documents, images, and the world around its user. Mark’s younger sister Karen, who is also blind, recently used it through smart glasses on safari in Kenya, receiving a running description of the animals around her and what they were doing.
Mark built the thing he had once gone looking for and could not find.
Which does raise one small modern etiquette question: If you send an unsolicited photograph to someone using ScribeMe, is there now a nonzero chance an AI will describe your poor judgment in detail?
Technology advances. Manners remain a separate research program.
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