Building AWRA for inclusive and practical use

Appearance and contrast

AWRA can be used light or dark. Each person chooses Light, Dark, or System — which follows the setting on their own computer or phone — and the choice applies to that person only, never to the whole organization. On the web the preference is stored on your account, so it follows you between devices; in the Android app it is stored on the handset, so a shared night-shift phone can stay dark for whoever picks it up next. Printing, PDFs and email stay light in every case, because a document is read on paper.

Dark mode is where contrast defects usually hide: a colour that was never stated is inherited from the browser, and a colour that was stated as a fixed value stops matching the surface behind it once the surface moves. Both fail silently, and both look correct in a light-mode screenshot. So the appearance layer is checked mechanically rather than by eye. Every colour in the dashboard resolves through a named token with a defined value in each theme, an automated check resolves each text colour against the background it actually sits on after the theme flips, and a second check refuses new hard-coded colours in the interface. All three run on every change and block release on a single finding — there is no threshold to relax and no allowance to spend.

Where an exception is genuinely correct — a barcode, which a scanner needs as dark ink on a light plate whatever the theme, or text on a fixed brand colour — it is listed individually with its reason rather than waved through as a class. Two things are deliberately outside the theme: machine-readable codes, and text intended to read as inactive, such as input placeholders and disabled controls, which are never used to carry information on their own.

This describes our own testing, not a third-party audit. We have not certified AWRA against a WCAG conformance level, and we would rather say so here than imply an assessment we have not had. If a screen is hard to read in either appearance, tell us which one and we will treat it as a defect.