AddThisFeature

Theme Acceptance Criteria

Set the bar every theme has to clear before it ships to anyone.

moderate Testing & QA

What it adds

A release gate for light, dark, branded, and customer-supplied themes, covering contrast, first paint, tokens, and print.

What your agent is told to do

5
  1. 1

    Write the criteria against the theme layer, not against individual screens. The question is whether a set of token values is fit to ship, and the answer should not require walking every page by hand.

  2. 2

    Require measured contrast for text, icons, borders, focus rings, and disabled content in every interactive state — resting, hover, focus, active, and selected — because a palette that passes at rest often fails on hover.

  3. 3

    Cover the surfaces that sit outside the component library: chart series and their gridlines, map and image overlays, embedded documents, illustrations, and any asset shipped as a fixed-colour file that will not follow the theme.

  4. 4

    State what the first paint must look like. The stored theme has to be resolved before anything renders, and a flash of the wrong theme is a failure of the gate, not a cosmetic quibble.

  5. 5

    Do not duplicate the per-component bar set by Component Acceptance Criteria. That document owns whether a component behaves correctly; this one owns whether a set of theme values is safe to apply across every component at once.

Edge cases it handles

7
  • Contrast must be checked in each interactive state and against each surface a component can sit on — a token that passes on the page background can fail on a card, a modal, or a coloured banner.
  • Charts, overlays, and shipped image assets are the usual escapees: a chart series palette tuned for a light background turns unreadable on dark, and a logo baked as a dark PNG disappears entirely.
  • First paint has to be tested with an empty cache and a slow connection, since a theme flash is invisible on a warm local reload and glaring for a real user.
  • A customer-supplied or branded theme can arrive with missing tokens, malformed values, or a brand colour that fails contrast — validate it on entry, refuse or correct what is unusable, and never let a partial token set render as a half-applied theme.
  • Print and forced-colours mode both override the theme in ways the app does not control, so each needs its own line: print on white regardless of the active theme, and forced colours without relying on colour alone to convey state.
  • A theme change while the app is open must repaint everything, including portals, toasts, and any component holding a colour it resolved once at mount.
  • The theme that follows the operating system preference must still honour an explicit user override, and the gate should check that the override wins.

Definition of done

9
  • Every theme is checked against the gate before release, including customer-supplied ones.
  • Contrast is measured for text, icons, borders, and focus rings in every interactive state and on every surface.
  • Charts, overlays, and fixed-colour assets are covered by explicit criteria rather than assumed to follow the theme.
  • First paint on a cold cache shows the correct theme with no flash.
  • Custom token sets are validated on entry and a partial set is refused rather than half-applied.
  • Print output and forced-colours mode each have their own stated pass conditions.
  • Per-component behaviour is left to Component Acceptance Criteria and not restated here.
  • 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.