Add "Global Climate Strike" banner to Drupal.org for a couple days

+1

This is probably something for the customizations running on drupal.org.

I like the idea and support the intention. Indeed, I’ve a personal history with XR 😇

However, there are two considerations that are relevant to whether the Association can do this:

1. Drupal.org is a massively important website to many businesses, rolling out websites. We have to be very sure and changes will not affect the functioning of the site
2. The Drupal Association is an Educational Bon-profit and, as such, is legally excluded from many forms of political activity. The Association would need to check that this kind of thing isn’t one of them. (For example, you’ll notice my blog posts around the rainbow logo for Pride month were very carefully worded to ensure it was a personal celebration)

In case this helps anyone else implement this, we ran into https://github.com/fightforthefuture/digital-climate-strike/issues/90#is...

This would be amazing. We've added it to one of our clients sites and will be adding the banner to our corporate site soon too.

This is now deployed, more information is at https://www.drupal.org/association/blog/digitalclimatestrike-and-drupalo...

Leaving this issue open because we need to back out this code once the day is over.

This may be an unpopular opinion but some dues-paying members of the Drupal Association like myself may have different policy positions on various issues. I think Drupal.org is a powerful, central platform for the software and community to gather, but I don't personally believe we should use the website for political activism, regardless of the cause. At the very least I think this type of outright endorsement and in-kind donation should go through the DA (through the board, an established process, something).

The issue summary on this ticket clearly acknowledges that this probably should go to the DA, but it didn't. I'd just like to register my disagreement that this decision.

I'll elaborate what I mean by it didn't go to the DA - I think this is a political endorsement (others may disagree) and as such should probably get an official decision rather than a simple sign-off.

rachel_norfolk & myself are employees of the Drupal Association and of course got sign-off from the leadership team before implementing this.

Fair enough, then I simply respectfully disagree with the DA on this one. Thanks for the reply.

This overlay is a BIG accessibility problem. It seriously hampers sighted keyboard users from using drupal.org, to the point of being unusable.

In the small form, as an overlay over the bottom inch of the screen. When tabbing through operable controls, eventually you reach one which is obscured by the overlay. The control which has focus cannot be seen, so this is a failure of WCAG's "Focus visible" success criterion. A keyboard user has no idea what they are focused on, even though they can still operate it.

In the large form, translucent, covering the whole viewport: When the page loads, pressing tab takes you to the skip-to-main-content link, then all the other controls in the normal order. I can just about see the skip links and main menu link focus underneath the green translucent overlay, but focus on other controls is harder to see. It's not easy for a keyboard user to dismiss this overlay. Pressing the escape key doesn't do it. There is a visible "X" in the top-right corner, but after pressing tab a few times, I can't figure out how to get to this "X". It turns out the overlay is actually an iframe appended after the body content, so to dismiss it I have to tab through every link on the page before eventually finding the focus on the X button.

Desktop screen reader users (using a keyboard) are not likely to know there is a banner on the screen at all. They might find it if they look for iframes, or read past the footer content. The main problem here is that the message isn't being presented in an inclusive way.

When doing stunts like this, please consider accessibility! I don't think the intention here was to prevent anyone from using drupal.org, so it's a big pity that it turned out this way.

Good catch, and sorry for not looking at that earlier. I assumed this would have been handled by the banner organizers. Luckily, I found a one-line fix.

That fix is now deployed on Drupal.org, and I opened a issue & pull request for them to hopefully fix this oversight on every other participating website: https://github.com/fightforthefuture/digital-climate-strike/issues/96

@bradjones1

I agree with you, while one can argue that climate change and pollution are societal/social ills, and not political activism, unfortunately the two have been tied together by people who believe that saying "I don't believe in addressing this issue by increasing taxes" means "I care more about money than the environment", thus positioning everyone who doesn't agree with the intents or methods of many environmental activism groups as "evil", "stupid", or "climate change denier".

Personally, I believe that legalizing all drugs, including heroin, will help greatly with the societal/social ill that is addiction, black markets, overdose, and property crime. That doesn't mean I would support drupal putting up a banner saying "#legalizeheroin digital strike", even if all research points towards decriminalization and legalization being the best solutions. Even though it's a societal issue, it's outside of the scope of Drupal itself and is a political issue, even if the majority of scientific research agrees that it should be treated as a public health issue rather than a criminal one, if legislation and partisanship is involved the issue becomes inherently political.

To be frank, I genuinely don't care either way, it doesn't really get in the way or anything, I just think it sets a bad precedent, at what point does the social/societal aspect of a campaign outweigh the political aspect? Would we accept a "build the wall" campaign if they say they aren't doing it as political activism, but rather because they want to raise awareness for the plight of illegal immigrants, as they are often in really shitty situations where they are abused and taken advantage of and can't get help because of their immigration status, a wall inherently prevents others from being put in this position and if we can stop further illegal immigration we can use resources to naturalize the illegal immigrants already here? Worse yet, the group who actually create/organize the broader campaign may not be interested in helping immigrants at all, they might just hate immigrants and want to build a wall, or they might just be interested in using fear mongering to raise money, but when you point that out you are just told "why don't you care about the immigrants? If we build a wall we can actually help the ones already here". Obviously I don't believe in building a wall, nor do I believe building a wall would help the illegal immigrants already here, but the argument that the campaign is about a social ill and not political activism can be easily made just like it is made here, so genuinely, what is the difference?

I think that is why it is important to try to stay out of politics for organizations like this. It's all good when we agree with the political position, but times and people change, and as soon as one "side" brings politics in, the other "side" will point to that and say well 10 years ago our organization supported X, so you can't use the argument of don't bring politics into it when we want to come out and say we support Y, even if you are personally repulsed by Y. It's the same reason you don't want a leader you support to create and exercise unprecedented powers, because in X years the other side might be the ones choosing the leader, and they now have a precedent for the exercise of the power created by the former leader, and while the former leader might have used the power only for good, the new leader could use the power for bad, because we opened the door for the exercise of that power.

Either way, there is no good answer and it's honestly none of my business anyways, I just figured I'd add some food for thought.

The code for this has now been removed.

Thanks Neil!