Inclusion. Sometimes, it’s the little things.
I put my foot in it yesterday.
I wanted to trumpet the awesome work the Drupal Association has done in concert with the community to finally upgrade localize.drupal.org. It’s a large, complex site. But it’s an important site. It’s the hub of the translation efforts for the Drupal project.
Here’s my tweet. It was favourited, and retweeted. Two people responded letting me know their countries had been excluded.
I wanted a big colourful image that screamed “International”. So I searched Google images for “International flags” and set the usage rights to “Labeled for reuse” and chose a cheerful cc-0 public domain image from Pixabay.
Unfortunately I didn’t look too closely, and failed to notice that it repeated many flags, and failed to include others. The flags for Spain and Turkey are missing in that picture. Probably many many others too. Thanks to penyaskito and yapmahayro for letting me know.
This exclusion was a careless accident on my part. Once it was pointed out to me, I went and found another image. This one is the “World Flag” from Wikipedia.
But this hasn’t fixed my faux-pas. And I’m still sorry.
The Drupal.org website used to have a map on the front page. At some point, members of the Japanese community pointed out that Japan wasn’t on that map. Oops? So we fixed it.
Yesterday I saw tweets about a new Slack feature called “Add to Slack”. Diogenes Brito wrote about why he used a brown hand for that button.
Sometimes, these things may seem small. They may seem inconsequential. They’re not. They matter.
When someone points out to you that you have inadvertently excluded them, how do you respond? That’s what matters most.
