AddThisFeature

Colour Contrast Guardrails

Stop custom colours and themes from making text and controls unreadable.

moderate Accessibility & Internationalization

What it adds

An audit of the app's colour tokens against WCAG contrast thresholds, fixes made in the palette itself, and an automated check that keeps regressions out.

What your agent is told to do

6
  1. 1

    Start by auditing the existing tokens: compute the contrast ratio for every foreground and background pair the app actually uses, and report the failures before changing anything.

  2. 2

    Fix the failures in the palette, not in the components that happen to expose them. Patching one button leaves the same bad pair waiting in nine other places.

  3. 3

    Check the combinations people forget: disabled text, placeholder text, borders on inputs, icons carrying meaning, and text sitting over images or gradients.

  4. 4

    Check focus indicators against both the component and the surface behind it. A focus ring that only contrasts with one of them disappears half the time.

  5. 5

    Add a check that runs in CI over the token pairs and fails the build on a regression, so a designer adding a lighter grey next quarter finds out immediately.

  6. 6

    Do NOT silently darken a brand colour to make it pass. Report the conflict and propose an adjusted value or a different pairing; changing brand colours without asking is not yours to do.

Edge cases it handles

7
  • Opacity changes the effective colour — compute against the composited result, not the declared value.
  • Large text has a lower threshold, so an audit that applies one number everywhere will report failures that are not failures.
  • Text over photographs has no single background; require a scrim or a solid plate rather than guessing an average.
  • Every interactive state needs checking — hover, active, selected, visited, disabled — not just the resting one.
  • Dark mode needs its own pass. Inverted palettes routinely fail where the light theme passed.
  • Charts and status colours must not rely on hue alone; two hues at equal lightness are indistinguishable to many users regardless of contrast.
  • If users can pick their own accent colour, validate it at the point of selection instead of shipping a broken theme.

Definition of done

8
  • Every foreground and background pair in use has been measured and the failures reported.
  • Body text meets WCAG AA, and non-text UI (borders, icons, focus rings) meets 3:1.
  • Fixes were made in the colour tokens rather than in individual components.
  • Disabled text, placeholder text, and text over images all pass or are explicitly documented as exempt.
  • Contrast is verified in every theme and every interactive state.
  • A CI check fails the build when a new token pair drops below threshold.
  • The feature matches the existing design system.
  • No existing functionality is broken.

Related features

How it works

  1. 1

    Copy the link

    Grab the Markdown instruction URL for this feature.

  2. 2

    Give it to your AI

    Paste it into Claude Code, Cursor, v0, Lovable — whatever you build with.

  3. 3

    It inspects, then implements

    Your agent reads your existing app first, then adds the feature to fit it.

Works with your stack

These instructions are written to adapt. They tell the agent to detect your framework, match your existing design system, and reuse what you already have — rather than assuming a particular stack.

Need it tighter than that? Customize the feature and tell it exactly what you're running.