I'm Just going out for a while, I may be some time. Glide: Making Mobility Easy Again!

In June 2024, I imagined walking to Sainsbury’s with Glide. Not in the abstract. Not as a product demo. Not as a shiny video where everything happens on perfect pavements, in perfect weather, with perfect lighting and a smiling blind person moving through the world as if the world had finally learned manners. I imagined the actual journey. Leaving the house. Feeling the pavement under my feet. Crossing side streets. Approaching the main road. Listening for traffic. Finding the entrance. Passing through the automatic doors. Moving from outside roughness to inside smoothness. Arriving, not just geographically, but bodily. It was a thought experiment. I said so at the time. I had given the scenario and some information about how Glide worked to a chatbot, and it produced a little imagined journey. There were issues with it, obviously. It talked about sidewalks and shopping carts, which made the whole thing sound suspiciously American. It was probably far too optimistic about the breeze, the bakery smells, and the air conditioning. But underneath the slightly glossy phrasing, there was something I recognised. A possibility. A blind person leaving home with a new kind of mobility device and getting somewhere ordinary. Not Everest. Not a TED Talk. Not a glossy future of accessibility campaign. Sainsbury’s. That mattered to me. I ended the post with: “Fifteen months to go?” At the time, it was speculative. Now it is beginning to look less like a story and more like a calendar entry. Glide is nearly here. I backed it early. I put down serious money, long before the device was in my hand, because I looked at what was being attempted and decided it was worth a serious bet. That is the word I keep coming back to: serious. Because a lot of the response to Glide has not treated it seriously. There has been good feedback too, of course. Lots of it. People who are excited. People who are curious. People who do not want one themselves but want to know how it performs. People who have asked intelligent questions about battery life, indoor navigation, stairs, wet weather, crowds, transport, dog mess, and what happens when the technology fails. Those questions matter. A primary mobility device is not a toy. It is not a phone case. It is not a fun optional accessory you can abandon at the first sign of inconvenience. It sits between your body and the world. It has to help you find kerbs, avoid obstacles, interpret uncertainty, manage risk, recover from errors, and keep going when the pavement is doing that uniquely British thing of being technically a pavement but spiritually rubble. So yes, ask questions. Ask about stairs. Ask about dog mess. Ask about rain. Ask about battery. Ask about what happens when it loses signal. Ask what happens in a crowded train station. Ask how it behaves near roads. Ask how much training users need. Ask whether it is a cane replacement, a dog alternative, a third category, or something else entirely. Ask who it is for. Ask who it is not for. Those are serious questions. But serious questions are not the same as sneering. And what I have noticed, from the beginning, is that alongside the curiosity and the genuine caution there has been something else: aggression, ridicule, fear, and a kind of emotional certainty that arrives before thought has finished putting its shoes on. “What about stairs?” As if blind people have never met stairs before. “What about dog mess?” As if cane tips glide through the world in a state of hygienic grace. “What if it goes wrong?” As if guide dogs never make mistakes, canes never miss things, sighted guides never misjudge, GPS never lies, and blind people are currently travelling through a perfectly solved universe. “What if you look stupid?” My darling, I am blind. If looking stupid were fatal, I would have died in 1987. I joke about hoping Glide does not get me killed. But the joke lands because the stakes are real. I know the stakes are real. That is the point. Nobody who has been blind for any length of time needs to be told that mobility involves risk. We live inside that calculation. Every journey is a small negotiation between desire and danger. Every independent trip contains a little private treaty between courage, skill, technology, memory, luck, weather, public design, and the behaviour of strangers. The cane is brilliant. It is also limited. The guide dog is brilliant. It is also limited. Human guide is brilliant. It is also limited. GPS is brilliant. It is also limited. AI description is brilliant. It is also limited. O&M training is essential. It is also not magic. Blind mobility has never been solved. It has been managed. That is why Glide matters. Not because it will solve everything. It will not. Not because everyone should want one. They should not. Not because the first version will be perfect. It almost certainly will not be. It matters because it is one of the first serious attempts in a very long time to create a new primary mobility option for blind people. That alone deserves better than mockery. What I find missing from a lot of the negative reaction is any recognition that the people behind Glide are serious people. They are not random hobbyists who glued a satnav to a shopping trolley and called it liberation. They are trying to build something enormously difficult: a device that touches the ground, interprets the environment, responds to obstacles, and guides a blind person through real space. That is hard. Not app hard. Not “we made a clever prototype” hard. Hard hard. Mobility hard. Public environment hard. Human trust hard. The kind of hard where a small mistake can become a frightening moment very quickly. That does not mean they are beyond criticism. Quite the opposite. Serious work deserves serious criticism. It needs it. It should be tested, challenged, questioned, improved, and held to the standard appropriate for something that may one day guide a blind person through traffic, crowds, stations, pavements, cafés, and all the little broken places where accessibility policy goes to die. But it should be criticised as serious work. And those of us who backed it should be treated as serious people too. I did not put down $900 two years in advance because I was seduced by a shiny future. I did it because I made a judgement. I watched. I read. I imagined. I questioned. I listened. I changed my mind in public. I thought about how it might fit into my actual life. The walk to Sainsbury’s was part of that. It was never really about Sainsbury’s. It was about the ordinary journey. The trip that is too short to be heroic and too important to outsource forever. The sort of journey sighted people barely think about but which, for a blind person, can be the difference between living locally and merely residing somewhere. Can I go to the shop? Can I get to the café? Can I arrive without being exhausted? Can I make the journey often enough that it becomes ordinary? Can I leave the house as a person, not as a logistical operation? That is what Glide is being asked to touch. Not my consumer excitement. My radius. That is why the sneering annoys me. Because when people reduce this to “what about stairs?” or “what about dog mess?” or “you are naïve if you trust that thing,” they are not only questioning a device. They are shrinking the imaginative space around blind mobility. They are saying whether they mean to or not: the existing compromises are the grown-up position. Wanting something different is childish. I reject that. Wanting more is not childish. Wanting another option is not childish. Wanting to test a new mobility category is not childish. Putting your own money into a serious attempt to expand blind independence is not childish. It is, if anything, painfully adult. Because backing something early means accepting uncertainty. It means knowing that the thing you receive may not match the thing you imagined. It means knowing you may be disappointed. It means knowing you may have to say, honestly, “This is not ready,” or “This is not for me,” or “This bit is wonderful, but that bit is impossible.” It means being willing to find out. And I am willing to find out. Maybe Glide will be magnificent. Maybe it will be useful but awkward. Maybe it will be brilliant outdoors and hopeless indoors. Maybe it will be excellent for confident cane users but unsuitable for people with poor balance, poor hearing, complex routes, or low tolerance for technological uncertainty. Maybe it will work beautifully in some towns and badly in others. Maybe the first version will feel like a beginning rather than a revolution. Maybe I will love it. Maybe I will send it back. But I would rather know. I would rather take part in the experiment than stand at the edge of the future laughing at the people prepared to step into it. There is also something else here, something deeper than product criticism. For a century, blind mobility has mostly been organised around a small number of accepted tools and practices. Cane. Dog. Human guide. Route learning. Public transport. Memory. Nerve. Those tools matter. They have given blind people freedom, safety, identity, and pride. I am not interested in sneering at tradition. I am not interested in the adolescent version of futurism where every old thing must be humiliated before a new thing can be loved. The cane is not obsolete. The guide dog is not obsolete. O&M is not obsolete. But neither is the future obliged to ask permission from the past before offering us another handle. That is the tension I keep seeing. Some people look at Glide and see danger. Some see hype. Some see liberation. Some see a threat to professional authority. Some see a threat to hard-earned cane skills. Some see a possible third primary mobility option. Some see a robot guide dog. Some see a mobility aid. Some see a punchline. I see a question becoming physical. What would happen if blind people had another way to move? Not a perfect way. Another way. That is enough to be worth my attention. And yes, I know the fantasy version is easy. The fantasy version is the smooth walk to Sainsbury’s where the device announces every crossing, detects every door, avoids every obstacle, understands every surface, and gently delivers me to the bakery aisle in a mist of warm bread and social progress. Real life will not be that clean. Real life is bins out on the wrong day. Real life is roadworks with no warning. Real life is the man who says “over there” and points. Real life is a dog off the lead. Real life is a silent cyclist. Real life is a café entrance where the map and the door disagree. Real life is the final thirty metres. That is exactly why we need to test it. Not because we believe the fantasy. Because we live in reality. A serious blind person backing Glide is not saying, “I believe the marketing.” She is saying, “This problem is worth trying to solve.” She is saying, “My independence is worth experimentation.” She is saying, “I understand the risk well enough to decide whether to take it.” She is saying, “I do not need fear disguised as wisdom to make the decision for me.” That, I think, is what has been missing from much of the conversation. Recognition of agency. Recognition that blind people can be excited without being gullible. Recognition that we can be hopeful and sceptical at the same time. Recognition that we can laugh about being killed by the robot and still understand risk. Recognition that $900 two years in advance was not a toy purchase. It was a considered act of support for a possible future. Recognition that the people building it are serious, the people testing it are serious, the questions are serious, and the desire underneath it is serious. I want to walk to Sainsbury’s. That sounds small. It is not small. Small journeys are the architecture of a life. The shop. The café. The bus stop. The GP surgery. The friend’s house. The train station. The park. The place you go because you felt like going, not because someone was available to take you. If Glide gives me even some of that with less friction, less exhaustion, less negotiation, less mental load, then it matters. If it does not, then I will say so. But I am done pretending that caution and cynicism are the same thing. Caution asks how it works. Cynicism hopes it fails so it can feel clever. Caution protects people. Cynicism protects the status quo. Caution belongs in the conversation. Cynicism can stand aside. Two years ago, I imagined walking to Sainsbury’s with Glide and wrote, “Fifteen months to go?” I did not know then whether the thought experiment would become anything more than a little speculative accessibility scene on the internet. Now it is almost here. The question is no longer whether I can imagine it. The question is what happens when I put my hand on the handle, step out of my front door, and find out, thirty months later.