While I can understand the frustration and the author makes some good points, a lot of the anger feels oddly misplaced.
Yes, engineer types want to solve problems with inventions rather than overhauling the entire nation's infrastructure. Maybe, just maybe, that's because inventing something is actually within their grasp, whereas wholesale replacing every civil engineer and architect in the country isn't? Or replacing every building and road regulation and the politicians who put them there?
It reminds me of the people in self-driving car threads complaining that the billions should've gone to transit. Sure, spending more on transit is a good idea, but it's not the tech companies' fault that it's perennially underfunded, it's politicians and the voters who put them there.
> Sure, spending more on transit is a good idea, but it's not the tech companies' fault that it's perennially underfunded
I think your overall point is relatively sound but that example is just terrible...
Elon Musk has repeatedly lobbied against transit expansion and his Hyperloop pitch arguably derailed HSR talks in California for half a decade while the Las Vegas teslertube prevented the expansion of a monorail to actually service the strip airport corridor.
I'll grant you Musk being terrible, no argument there, but that's not tech companies as a whole.
And California hardly needed any help to sabotage its HSR, the state's whole process for that kind of development is incredibly backwards and broken, sadly.
I quite enjoy playing with robots, but I'd rather coordinate the design and installation of 1000 ramps than be involved with one walking liability sedan chair. If you care about results and reliability, no shit a competent engineer will be picking the one that has no moving parts and a 10,000 year track record.
The fact that this is or isn't happening is basically unrelated to inventing new stuff. It's almost entirely a political issue, not one of engineering.
Many "engineer types" will gladly care about doorknobs and infrastructure details. There is ideological opposition against from business types and some other tech types.
> it's not the tech companies' fault that it's perennially underfunded, it's politicians and the voters who put them there.
Tech companies pushed for exactly that outcome and spent a lot on lobbying and convincing. We totally can blame them for it.
> Many "engineer types" will gladly care about doorknobs and infrastructure details.
Some will, and that's great, but as the blog post accurately points out, the invention of these things isn't the primary issue, it's the lack of implementation. And that isn't the fault of the engineers designing better doorknobs or ramps.
> Tech companies pushed for exactly that outcome and spent a lot on lobbying and convincing. We totally can blame them for it.
Bullshit. The US has had underfunded transit for near a century now because of our obsession with cars. Trying to blame this on tech companies is a lame excuse.
How are Tech companies fighting public transit? At least in these parts a relatively high fraction of their employees commute by (private) bus.
I can only presume that Tech companies would prefer the government provide safe, clean, and timely bussing for the public to save the company the cost and effort.
Hyperloop and Boring Company were both created as distractions from real proven transit technologies, and the latter has been quite successful at getting rail projects cancelled or at least confusing politicians enough to delay them.
They generally would, though for the most part I imagine they're just ambivalent here. As long as workers can get to work, that's most of what they care about.
The author is seeing that it's easier for one team to get backing (VC money, course credit, design awards, TED talk applause, etc.) for "solving" an accessibility problem than for us to enforce that entire industries follow good accessibility practices in new work and retrofit existing work. In theory industry-wide enforcement is the sort of thing legislation like the ADA solves, but obviously that hasn't been completely effective. Not sure how to fix it.
There was a subthread recently complaining about password managers and their UX problems. These aren't aimed specifically at "disabled" users, but I think it's a similar situation. We can't reliably enforce good standards for sign-in (whether that's just setting the autofill attribute correctly and choosing the correct event handlers for Javascript validators or something far more ambitious), so we expect a password manager to just deal with the web as it is. IMHO they work remarkably well given that constraint, but it's not optimal overall.
Yeah, it kinda feels like a banal thing to hate on. "They're only doing this because it's easier to create a prototype invention than to redo all design standards and enforcement in the country!" I mean, yeah? What exactly is the implied alternative for the sort of individuals targeted by the blog post?
The video of the prototype invention has the effect of making people think they don't need to be concerned about ramps and doorknobs and ADA enforcement because some teen in a garage has just solved this problem forever. People who need accommodations also require the political support of able-bodied people in order to actually make change happen, and his argument is that these videos dissipate that support.
> his argument is that these videos dissipate that support.
That seems like a major stretch. Really feels like letting the perfect be the enemy of the good here, like saying that a video about improved airbags means that nobody will care about safer road design anymore.
The expressed (not implied) alternative in the post is for those people to stop pretending they care, and start actually caring. Stop trying to save the world. The world doesn't need an invention to save it. Just put that energy into caring about others.
People do care, but there are so many problems in the world, and only so much caring to go around.
It's extremely cynical to view it as "people pretend to care", rather than looking around and realizing there's a ton of important problems out there that the caring is distributed over. People care about disabilities, but they also care about war, about public schooling, about the environment, about feminism, about animal rights, about transparency in government, about road safety, about child well-being, about unemployment, and so on. All of these are important things, and of course there are dozens more that I haven't listed.
And inventions are sometimes actually useful. Sure, most of those prototypes will go nowhere, but every once in a while something that really helps is invented. And you can't predict in advance only the ones that will actually go on to help.
Some people actually care, but they can't always win the battle at their own companies when there are other priorities, much less go fix all the other websites, pour concrete at other businesses, etc. Is the solution for everyone to care? If, so how do you accomplish that? ("Americans with Disability Act" v2?)
There's a general problem on the web (and to a lesser extent computing in general) that UX is just widely terrible. I think part of this is because developers tend to work at the very edge of their competence, and getting something working at all is a major feat, with no room left over for making it work well. And part of it is developers or designers deciding they know better than everyone else. A lot of this was a solved problem back in the 80s: the platform provides a standard UI toolkit and a set of standard idioms, and all software uses them. But this lesson is ignored because developers and designers don't like it when their stuff looks and works just like everything else. Making buttons that look like everyone else's buttons means you don't set yourself apart, so we end up with custom buttons that look different and don't work as well. And, of course, are less accessible, because accessibility requires integration into the overall system that doesn't exist with a custom solution.
I was a Mac fiend back in the "beleaguered" days, and standard widgets and idioms were a big deal in that community. There was broad consensus that apps should all look and work the same, as much as that was possible. A button should be a button and a text field should be a text field no matter what program it was in. That all went out the window with the web, for no particularly good reason, and it's infecting non-web platforms at an alarming rate.
100% agree about the UX problems. Most engineers would be happy to fix those issues, but of course, companies always want the new features...because that's what customers want and what drives more $$$.
Sadly, it's true that the % of new sales generated by improving a11y beyond the bare minimum isn't going to be terribly large. That's why it's important to have regulations that mandate decent support, because the monetary incentive that drives corporate behavior just isn't there.
The author is simultaneously correct and incorrect.
The author is correct that simple and cheap changes such as ramps and door knobs are the logical fixes. And yes, based on personal experience, companies hate disabled people at the first sign that they will be an inconvenience to the company.
However, nature has no such things. If you enjoy nature and the outdoors, then user-specific equipment can provide capabilities not available through cheap alternatives. The prototypes shown are always marketing with some flair to it. Yes, the noise and bulk are terrible, but proof of concept can lead to improvements over time - eg you're looking at a some no-name competitor to the Model T (prototype suit), just imagine what the 2026 civic will look like (suits 75 years from now).
The author seems to be screaming into the void here. The task of rebuilding infrastructure is mountainous compared to attempting new technological solutions.
I do agree with his rant about clean and semantic HTML being nessecary for accessibility. It's too often overlooked (as I scramble to check my sites for alt-text on images)
I’m inclined to think of Apple, who seem to bake accessibility deeply into their products. From my point of view, maybe their investment in accessibility has led to emergent breakthroughs in hardware design. This is just my impression however
I thought the idea behind exoskeletons and fancy wheelchairs was that they allow handicapped people to go more places, not to substitute for better infrastructure. I haven't seen any of the companies behind these devices claim that they make such improvements obsolete. And as the post mentions, such infrastructure is useful for anyone with luggage, a stroller, or a hand truck.
And yes, the cost of such devices is high today, but that's true of any new technology. The first print reading devices were huge machines that cost tens of thousands of dollars. Now the technology is free on your phone. Early hearing aids were bulky, expensive, and not much better than an ear horn. Now they're affordable, compact, and have handy features like bluetooth connectivity. My guess is that most of these prototypes will fizzle and go nowhere, but some will succeed, and the lives of disabled people will be improved by them.
> I thought the idea behind exoskeletons and fancy wheelchairs was that they allow handicapped people to go more places, not to substitute for better infrastructure. I haven't seen any of the companies behind these devices claim that they make such improvements obsolete.
They don't need to, and the might not even do that, but the boosters and the clipfarms are very much in on it. You don't see that "engagement" for continuous sidewalks and raised crosswalks despite how amazing they are.
And they're also very convenient as a way to avoid infrastructural improvements, you can point to disability dongles as a reason not to invest in it, that way you're conveniently not bearing the cost.
> And as the post mentions, such infrastructure is useful for anyone with luggage, a stroller, or a hand truck.
The problem is that's at best a post-hoc realisation, when that argument is made upfront it's pretty much always dismissed out of hand (very much blub adjacent), you can see it in pretty much every discussion about better walk/bike infrastructure.
> I don’t need a stair-climbing wheelchair that costs $30,000 and requires a maintenance crew. I need better doorknobs and/or a ramp. But a ramp is boring. You can't make investors have a hard on for a ramp that doesn't connect to the cloud. You can’t give a TED Talk about a ramp. You can’t get venture capital funding for a slightly wider doorframe.
It's a really cynical way to attack people who are at least sort of trying to help.
And obviously the inventions of "a ramp" and "slightly wider door" already exist; those aren't a matter of invention, they're a matter of regulations and enforcement.
Contributing to a net loss of funding and attention, all while making the public more ignorant and more passive, results in material harms to the population they claim to serve.
This kind of self-aggrandizement at other's expense deserves to be recognized as it is and should be met with an equal measure of contempt.
Really letting the perfect be the enemy of the good here. No, we can't let people attempt new inventions, some of which may actually help, because the mere fact that people will see them may result in less attention for more basic, important stuff.
Is there solid evidence that TED talks about stair-climbing wheelchairs undermine actual regulations and investments in ramps, or is this more of a "my source is that I made it up" kind of situation?
When there is a substantial elevation difference you need a lot of ramp--which needs a lot of space.
We already are seeing the problem with road construction--cities avoiding doing work that would require bringing the sidewalks up to current standards. I don't know what the issue is but those curb cuts for wheelchairs are labor intensive.
I don't see why it's either/or. There are a lot more legacy doors and stairs especially around the world, than there are people who could be helped with a climbing wheelchair or exoskeleton frame. And there's some infrastructure that might not be possible to upgrade, for historical preservation reasons.
Maybe the tech will always be too bulky, but it could also be rented out on location when traveling.
There's already a lot of ramps, there's probably never going to be a lot more ramps, I think I'd like to have some technology to assist me with edge cases.
I have a buddy who did his Human Factors PHd at wright state/wright patt nearly 15 years ago.
"Tech people" have a lot of lies they believe, about disabilities, about valid addresses, everything.
When he told me that schools for the blind train their student to fact check things like directions and not simply rely on a single source while navigating new terrain it clicked for me that the sighted have no clue and sympathy is more honest and less presumptive/simulative than empathy.
But to be sympathetic you have to listen to actual user feedback and do actual observation, with empathy you just get to use your imagination to put yourself in their shoes.
At least for some definition of sympathy and some definition of empathy.
The casual ableism is not unique to tech but I do notice its prevalence, both here and in my career.
I am slightly disabled physically, I've made comments here a time or two where someone will make a (probably unintentionally) dismissive comment like "This is easy, just do XYZ every day" and I'll make a comment like "lots of people cannot do XYZ every day due to disability" and there's a literal backlash of commenters like "well obviously we're not talking about them," like, what? Do you think disabled people don't exist? That seems to be the implication, it comes out casually so much in my daily interactions, some people are almost offended by the idea of it even.
I mean, there's a lot going on here, contextually speaking.
If I made a comment saying "oh just write a quick bash script to change all the files to pngs" and someone commented saying "lots of people cannot write a bash script because they don't know bash", is that a useful comment?
While I can understand the frustration and the author makes some good points, a lot of the anger feels oddly misplaced.
Yes, engineer types want to solve problems with inventions rather than overhauling the entire nation's infrastructure. Maybe, just maybe, that's because inventing something is actually within their grasp, whereas wholesale replacing every civil engineer and architect in the country isn't? Or replacing every building and road regulation and the politicians who put them there?
It reminds me of the people in self-driving car threads complaining that the billions should've gone to transit. Sure, spending more on transit is a good idea, but it's not the tech companies' fault that it's perennially underfunded, it's politicians and the voters who put them there.
Changing infrastructure would cost way less than buying hardware for all disabled people.
So you don’t solve the problem, you just solve it for a tiny group of wealthy people
> Sure, spending more on transit is a good idea, but it's not the tech companies' fault that it's perennially underfunded
I think your overall point is relatively sound but that example is just terrible...
Elon Musk has repeatedly lobbied against transit expansion and his Hyperloop pitch arguably derailed HSR talks in California for half a decade while the Las Vegas teslertube prevented the expansion of a monorail to actually service the strip airport corridor.
I'll grant you Musk being terrible, no argument there, but that's not tech companies as a whole.
And California hardly needed any help to sabotage its HSR, the state's whole process for that kind of development is incredibly backwards and broken, sadly.
HSR derailed itself. CA takes 95% of the blame
agreed on the LV monorail though
I quite enjoy playing with robots, but I'd rather coordinate the design and installation of 1000 ramps than be involved with one walking liability sedan chair. If you care about results and reliability, no shit a competent engineer will be picking the one that has no moving parts and a 10,000 year track record.
The fact that this is or isn't happening is basically unrelated to inventing new stuff. It's almost entirely a political issue, not one of engineering.
Many "engineer types" will gladly care about doorknobs and infrastructure details. There is ideological opposition against from business types and some other tech types.
> it's not the tech companies' fault that it's perennially underfunded, it's politicians and the voters who put them there.
Tech companies pushed for exactly that outcome and spent a lot on lobbying and convincing. We totally can blame them for it.
> Many "engineer types" will gladly care about doorknobs and infrastructure details.
Some will, and that's great, but as the blog post accurately points out, the invention of these things isn't the primary issue, it's the lack of implementation. And that isn't the fault of the engineers designing better doorknobs or ramps.
> Tech companies pushed for exactly that outcome and spent a lot on lobbying and convincing. We totally can blame them for it.
Bullshit. The US has had underfunded transit for near a century now because of our obsession with cars. Trying to blame this on tech companies is a lame excuse.
How are Tech companies fighting public transit? At least in these parts a relatively high fraction of their employees commute by (private) bus.
I can only presume that Tech companies would prefer the government provide safe, clean, and timely bussing for the public to save the company the cost and effort.
Hyperloop and Boring Company were both created as distractions from real proven transit technologies, and the latter has been quite successful at getting rail projects cancelled or at least confusing politicians enough to delay them.
So it's basically just Tesla/Musk here, when people say "tech companies"?
Musk is an asshole, no argument there, but most tech company CEOs aren't nearly that crazy.
They generally would, though for the most part I imagine they're just ambivalent here. As long as workers can get to work, that's most of what they care about.
The author is seeing that it's easier for one team to get backing (VC money, course credit, design awards, TED talk applause, etc.) for "solving" an accessibility problem than for us to enforce that entire industries follow good accessibility practices in new work and retrofit existing work. In theory industry-wide enforcement is the sort of thing legislation like the ADA solves, but obviously that hasn't been completely effective. Not sure how to fix it.
There was a subthread recently complaining about password managers and their UX problems. These aren't aimed specifically at "disabled" users, but I think it's a similar situation. We can't reliably enforce good standards for sign-in (whether that's just setting the autofill attribute correctly and choosing the correct event handlers for Javascript validators or something far more ambitious), so we expect a password manager to just deal with the web as it is. IMHO they work remarkably well given that constraint, but it's not optimal overall.
Yeah, it kinda feels like a banal thing to hate on. "They're only doing this because it's easier to create a prototype invention than to redo all design standards and enforcement in the country!" I mean, yeah? What exactly is the implied alternative for the sort of individuals targeted by the blog post?
The video of the prototype invention has the effect of making people think they don't need to be concerned about ramps and doorknobs and ADA enforcement because some teen in a garage has just solved this problem forever. People who need accommodations also require the political support of able-bodied people in order to actually make change happen, and his argument is that these videos dissipate that support.
> his argument is that these videos dissipate that support.
That seems like a major stretch. Really feels like letting the perfect be the enemy of the good here, like saying that a video about improved airbags means that nobody will care about safer road design anymore.
The expressed (not implied) alternative in the post is for those people to stop pretending they care, and start actually caring. Stop trying to save the world. The world doesn't need an invention to save it. Just put that energy into caring about others.
People do care, but there are so many problems in the world, and only so much caring to go around.
It's extremely cynical to view it as "people pretend to care", rather than looking around and realizing there's a ton of important problems out there that the caring is distributed over. People care about disabilities, but they also care about war, about public schooling, about the environment, about feminism, about animal rights, about transparency in government, about road safety, about child well-being, about unemployment, and so on. All of these are important things, and of course there are dozens more that I haven't listed.
And inventions are sometimes actually useful. Sure, most of those prototypes will go nowhere, but every once in a while something that really helps is invented. And you can't predict in advance only the ones that will actually go on to help.
Holy smokes, that comes across as "We just want all people to be impoverished equally".
Some people actually care, but they can't always win the battle at their own companies when there are other priorities, much less go fix all the other websites, pour concrete at other businesses, etc. Is the solution for everyone to care? If, so how do you accomplish that? ("Americans with Disability Act" v2?)
There's a general problem on the web (and to a lesser extent computing in general) that UX is just widely terrible. I think part of this is because developers tend to work at the very edge of their competence, and getting something working at all is a major feat, with no room left over for making it work well. And part of it is developers or designers deciding they know better than everyone else. A lot of this was a solved problem back in the 80s: the platform provides a standard UI toolkit and a set of standard idioms, and all software uses them. But this lesson is ignored because developers and designers don't like it when their stuff looks and works just like everything else. Making buttons that look like everyone else's buttons means you don't set yourself apart, so we end up with custom buttons that look different and don't work as well. And, of course, are less accessible, because accessibility requires integration into the overall system that doesn't exist with a custom solution.
I was a Mac fiend back in the "beleaguered" days, and standard widgets and idioms were a big deal in that community. There was broad consensus that apps should all look and work the same, as much as that was possible. A button should be a button and a text field should be a text field no matter what program it was in. That all went out the window with the web, for no particularly good reason, and it's infecting non-web platforms at an alarming rate.
100% agree about the UX problems. Most engineers would be happy to fix those issues, but of course, companies always want the new features...because that's what customers want and what drives more $$$.
Sadly, it's true that the % of new sales generated by improving a11y beyond the bare minimum isn't going to be terribly large. That's why it's important to have regulations that mandate decent support, because the monetary incentive that drives corporate behavior just isn't there.
The author is simultaneously correct and incorrect.
The author is correct that simple and cheap changes such as ramps and door knobs are the logical fixes. And yes, based on personal experience, companies hate disabled people at the first sign that they will be an inconvenience to the company.
However, nature has no such things. If you enjoy nature and the outdoors, then user-specific equipment can provide capabilities not available through cheap alternatives. The prototypes shown are always marketing with some flair to it. Yes, the noise and bulk are terrible, but proof of concept can lead to improvements over time - eg you're looking at a some no-name competitor to the Model T (prototype suit), just imagine what the 2026 civic will look like (suits 75 years from now).
The author seems to be screaming into the void here. The task of rebuilding infrastructure is mountainous compared to attempting new technological solutions.
I do agree with his rant about clean and semantic HTML being nessecary for accessibility. It's too often overlooked (as I scramble to check my sites for alt-text on images)
I’m inclined to think of Apple, who seem to bake accessibility deeply into their products. From my point of view, maybe their investment in accessibility has led to emergent breakthroughs in hardware design. This is just my impression however
I thought the idea behind exoskeletons and fancy wheelchairs was that they allow handicapped people to go more places, not to substitute for better infrastructure. I haven't seen any of the companies behind these devices claim that they make such improvements obsolete. And as the post mentions, such infrastructure is useful for anyone with luggage, a stroller, or a hand truck.
And yes, the cost of such devices is high today, but that's true of any new technology. The first print reading devices were huge machines that cost tens of thousands of dollars. Now the technology is free on your phone. Early hearing aids were bulky, expensive, and not much better than an ear horn. Now they're affordable, compact, and have handy features like bluetooth connectivity. My guess is that most of these prototypes will fizzle and go nowhere, but some will succeed, and the lives of disabled people will be improved by them.
> I thought the idea behind exoskeletons and fancy wheelchairs was that they allow handicapped people to go more places, not to substitute for better infrastructure. I haven't seen any of the companies behind these devices claim that they make such improvements obsolete.
They don't need to, and the might not even do that, but the boosters and the clipfarms are very much in on it. You don't see that "engagement" for continuous sidewalks and raised crosswalks despite how amazing they are.
And they're also very convenient as a way to avoid infrastructural improvements, you can point to disability dongles as a reason not to invest in it, that way you're conveniently not bearing the cost.
> And as the post mentions, such infrastructure is useful for anyone with luggage, a stroller, or a hand truck.
The problem is that's at best a post-hoc realisation, when that argument is made upfront it's pretty much always dismissed out of hand (very much blub adjacent), you can see it in pretty much every discussion about better walk/bike infrastructure.
> I don’t need a stair-climbing wheelchair that costs $30,000 and requires a maintenance crew. I need better doorknobs and/or a ramp. But a ramp is boring. You can't make investors have a hard on for a ramp that doesn't connect to the cloud. You can’t give a TED Talk about a ramp. You can’t get venture capital funding for a slightly wider doorframe.
It's a really cynical way to attack people who are at least sort of trying to help.
And obviously the inventions of "a ramp" and "slightly wider door" already exist; those aren't a matter of invention, they're a matter of regulations and enforcement.
Contributing to a net loss of funding and attention, all while making the public more ignorant and more passive, results in material harms to the population they claim to serve.
This kind of self-aggrandizement at other's expense deserves to be recognized as it is and should be met with an equal measure of contempt.
Really letting the perfect be the enemy of the good here. No, we can't let people attempt new inventions, some of which may actually help, because the mere fact that people will see them may result in less attention for more basic, important stuff.
Is there solid evidence that TED talks about stair-climbing wheelchairs undermine actual regulations and investments in ramps, or is this more of a "my source is that I made it up" kind of situation?
And sometimes seriously non-trivial.
When there is a substantial elevation difference you need a lot of ramp--which needs a lot of space.
We already are seeing the problem with road construction--cities avoiding doing work that would require bringing the sidewalks up to current standards. I don't know what the issue is but those curb cuts for wheelchairs are labor intensive.
A lot of problems are like that. They don't require anything fancy, just regulation, a budget or regular maintenance.
I don't see why it's either/or. There are a lot more legacy doors and stairs especially around the world, than there are people who could be helped with a climbing wheelchair or exoskeleton frame. And there's some infrastructure that might not be possible to upgrade, for historical preservation reasons.
Maybe the tech will always be too bulky, but it could also be rented out on location when traveling.
There's already a lot of ramps, there's probably never going to be a lot more ramps, I think I'd like to have some technology to assist me with edge cases.
I have a buddy who did his Human Factors PHd at wright state/wright patt nearly 15 years ago.
"Tech people" have a lot of lies they believe, about disabilities, about valid addresses, everything.
When he told me that schools for the blind train their student to fact check things like directions and not simply rely on a single source while navigating new terrain it clicked for me that the sighted have no clue and sympathy is more honest and less presumptive/simulative than empathy.
But to be sympathetic you have to listen to actual user feedback and do actual observation, with empathy you just get to use your imagination to put yourself in their shoes.
At least for some definition of sympathy and some definition of empathy.
The casual ableism is not unique to tech but I do notice its prevalence, both here and in my career.
I am slightly disabled physically, I've made comments here a time or two where someone will make a (probably unintentionally) dismissive comment like "This is easy, just do XYZ every day" and I'll make a comment like "lots of people cannot do XYZ every day due to disability" and there's a literal backlash of commenters like "well obviously we're not talking about them," like, what? Do you think disabled people don't exist? That seems to be the implication, it comes out casually so much in my daily interactions, some people are almost offended by the idea of it even.
I mean, there's a lot going on here, contextually speaking.
If I made a comment saying "oh just write a quick bash script to change all the files to pngs" and someone commented saying "lots of people cannot write a bash script because they don't know bash", is that a useful comment?
That seems pretty anathema to current trends. The underlying refrain is that users are stupid and cannot be trusted. Faster horses and all that.
Shut up monkeys, I will tell you what you want.
Look no further than some of the comments on this very post.
Instead of trying to refute the OP, maybe people should listen to what he's saying.
It's a form of engaging, plus it's a rant.
I've yet to see good outcomes from self-infantilizing.