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  "path": "/forum/assistive-technology/im-just-going-out-while-i-may-be-some-time-glide-making-mobility-easy",
  "publishedAt": "2026-06-16T13:18:19.000Z",
  "site": "https://applevis.com",
  "textContent": "In June 2024, I imagined walking to Sainsbury’s with Glide.\nNot 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.\nI imagined the actual journey.\nLeaving the house.\nFeeling the pavement under my feet.\nCrossing side streets.\nApproaching the main road.\nListening for traffic.\nFinding the entrance.\nPassing through the automatic doors.\nMoving from outside roughness to inside smoothness.\nArriving, not just geographically, but bodily.\nIt 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.\nA possibility.\nA blind person leaving home with a new kind of mobility device and getting somewhere ordinary.\nNot Everest.\nNot a TED Talk.\nNot a glossy future of accessibility campaign.\nSainsbury’s.\nThat mattered to me.\nI ended the post with: “Fifteen months to go?”\nAt the time, it was speculative. Now it is beginning to look less like a story and more like a calendar entry.\nGlide is nearly here.\nI 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.\nThat is the word I keep coming back to: serious.\nBecause a lot of the response to Glide has not treated it seriously.\nThere 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.\nThose questions matter.\nA 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.\nSo yes, ask questions.\nAsk about stairs.\nAsk about dog mess.\nAsk about rain.\nAsk about battery.\nAsk about what happens when it loses signal.\nAsk what happens in a crowded train station.\nAsk how it behaves near roads.\nAsk how much training users need.\nAsk whether it is a cane replacement, a dog alternative, a third category, or something else entirely.\nAsk who it is for.\nAsk who it is not for.\nThose are serious questions.\nBut serious questions are not the same as sneering.\nAnd 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.\n“What about stairs?”\nAs if blind people have never met stairs before.\n“What about dog mess?”\nAs if cane tips glide through the world in a state of hygienic grace.\n“What if it goes wrong?”\nAs 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.\n“What if you look stupid?”\nMy darling, I am blind. If looking stupid were fatal, I would have died in 1987.\nI 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.\nWe live inside that calculation.\nEvery 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.\nThe cane is brilliant. It is also limited.\nThe guide dog is brilliant. It is also limited.\nHuman guide is brilliant. It is also limited.\nGPS is brilliant. It is also limited.\nAI description is brilliant. It is also limited.\nO&M training is essential. It is also not magic.\nBlind mobility has never been solved. It has been managed.\nThat is why Glide matters.\nNot because it will solve everything. It will not.\nNot because everyone should want one. They should not.\nNot because the first version will be perfect. It almost certainly will not be.\nIt 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.\nThat alone deserves better than mockery.\nWhat I find missing from a lot of the negative reaction is any recognition that the people behind Glide are serious people.\nThey 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.\nThat is hard.\nNot app hard.\nNot “we made a clever prototype” hard.\nHard hard.\nMobility hard.\nPublic environment hard.\nHuman trust hard.\nThe kind of hard where a small mistake can become a frightening moment very quickly.\nThat 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.\nBut it should be criticised as serious work.\nAnd those of us who backed it should be treated as serious people too.\nI 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.\nI watched.\nI read.\nI imagined.\nI questioned.\nI listened.\nI changed my mind in public.\nI thought about how it might fit into my actual life.\nThe 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.\nCan I go to the shop?\nCan I get to the café?\nCan I arrive without being exhausted?\nCan I make the journey often enough that it becomes ordinary?\nCan I leave the house as a person, not as a logistical operation?\nThat is what Glide is being asked to touch.\nNot my consumer excitement.\nMy radius.\nThat is why the sneering annoys me.\nBecause 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.\nThey are saying whether they mean to or not: the existing compromises are the grown-up position. Wanting something different is childish.\nI reject that.\nWanting more is not childish.\nWanting another option is not childish.\nWanting to test a new mobility category is not childish.\nPutting your own money into a serious attempt to expand blind independence is not childish.\nIt is, if anything, painfully adult.\nBecause 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.”\nIt means being willing to find out.\nAnd I am willing to find out.\nMaybe Glide will be magnificent.\nMaybe it will be useful but awkward.\nMaybe it will be brilliant outdoors and hopeless indoors.\nMaybe 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.\nMaybe it will work beautifully in some towns and badly in others.\nMaybe the first version will feel like a beginning rather than a revolution.\nMaybe I will love it.\nMaybe I will send it back.\nBut I would rather know.\nI would rather take part in the experiment than stand at the edge of the future laughing at the people prepared to step into it.\nThere is also something else here, something deeper than product criticism.\nFor 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.\nThose 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.\nThe cane is not obsolete.\nThe guide dog is not obsolete.\nO&M is not obsolete.\nBut neither is the future obliged to ask permission from the past before offering us another handle.\nThat is the tension I keep seeing.\nSome people look at Glide and see danger.\nSome see hype.\nSome see liberation.\nSome see a threat to professional authority.\nSome see a threat to hard-earned cane skills.\nSome see a possible third primary mobility option.\nSome see a robot guide dog.\nSome see a mobility aid.\nSome see a punchline.\nI see a question becoming physical.\nWhat would happen if blind people had another way to move?\nNot a perfect way.\nAnother way.\nThat is enough to be worth my attention.\nAnd 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.\nReal life will not be that clean.\nReal life is bins out on the wrong day.\nReal life is roadworks with no warning.\nReal life is the man who says “over there” and points.\nReal life is a dog off the lead.\nReal life is a silent cyclist.\nReal life is a café entrance where the map and the door disagree.\nReal life is the final thirty metres.\nThat is exactly why we need to test it.\nNot because we believe the fantasy.\nBecause we live in reality.\nA serious blind person backing Glide is not saying, “I believe the marketing.”\nShe is saying, “This problem is worth trying to solve.”\nShe is saying, “My independence is worth experimentation.”\nShe is saying, “I understand the risk well enough to decide whether to take it.”\nShe is saying, “I do not need fear disguised as wisdom to make the decision for me.”\nThat, I think, is what has been missing from much of the conversation.\nRecognition of agency.\nRecognition that blind people can be excited without being gullible.\nRecognition that we can be hopeful and sceptical at the same time.\nRecognition that we can laugh about being killed by the robot and still understand risk.\nRecognition that $900 two years in advance was not a toy purchase. It was a considered act of support for a possible future.\nRecognition that the people building it are serious, the people testing it are serious, the questions are serious, and the desire underneath it is serious.\nI want to walk to Sainsbury’s.\nThat sounds small.\nIt is not small.\nSmall journeys are the architecture of a life.\nThe shop.\nThe café.\nThe bus stop.\nThe GP surgery.\nThe friend’s house.\nThe train station.\nThe park.\nThe place you go because you felt like going, not because someone was available to take you.\nIf Glide gives me even some of that with less friction, less exhaustion, less negotiation, less mental load, then it matters.\nIf it does not, then I will say so.\nBut I am done pretending that caution and cynicism are the same thing.\nCaution asks how it works.\nCynicism hopes it fails so it can feel clever.\nCaution protects people.\nCynicism protects the status quo.\nCaution belongs in the conversation.\nCynicism can stand aside.\nTwo years ago, I imagined walking to Sainsbury’s with Glide and wrote, “Fifteen months to go?”\nI did not know then whether the thought experiment would become anything more than a little speculative accessibility scene on the internet.\nNow it is almost here.\nThe question is no longer whether I can imagine it.\nThe question is what happens when I put my hand on the handle, step out of my front door, and find out, thirty months later.",
  "title": "I'm Just going out for a while, I may be some time. Glide: Making Mobility Easy Again!"
}