Runtime contrast for hand-written hex backgrounds

DESIGN/10's ≥ 4.5:1 rule gets its owner. ContrastMath is the pure seam:
WCAG relative luminance (piecewise sRGB linearization), symmetric
contrast ratio, source-over compositing (an #RRGGBBAA board colour
resolves over the window background of the active appearance), and
inkChoice — native label if it clears AA, else the other appearance's,
else the higher ratio with meetsAA false (a mid-grey hex can max out
below 4.5 against both 85%-alpha labels; the app paints the best
available rather than overriding the user's colour). BoardTextInk is
the board's application: the decision is a ColorScheme, not a Color —
the text on the board fill is a hierarchy (.primary/.secondary/
.quaternary), and overriding the subtree's scheme moves the whole
vocabulary coherently. Recomputed on appearance change by construction
(read in body); label/backdrop colours resolve inside the asked-for
appearance, Increase Contrast variants included.

Two render sites — the only board text that sits on the user's colour:
the lane header (lanes draw no plate; title, icon, badge, rename field
and the + button land directly on the board fill) and the trash header
(its wash is ~5% effective alpha). Menus, popovers, and drag replicas
deliberately stay native; card faces carry their own opaque plates.

The card's premise fell during implementation: 03's "palette pairs
AA-verified at design time, pinned by a computed-contrast unit test"
was false — no such test existed, and the m4 path drew the native label,
failing AA in one appearance for all twelve wells (obsidian in Light
Mode: 1.0:1). Palette names now route through the same ink selection
(paintedColor delegates to Palette.nsColor — one predicate with
BoardView's paint decision), and PaletteContrastTests pins that the
chosen ink clears AA for every well in both appearances — plus
theNativeLabelIsNeverEnough, which would have failed on the m4 code.
Filed on the Redesign board for ratification. 1579 unit tests green,
both schemes build.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01SR4XGjmBE16ZUYWpfFHXwY
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2026-07-29 10:20:16 -04:00
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@@ -48,7 +48,7 @@ Lanework is in early development. This list tracks what has actually shipped and
- **The agent guide** — every board root carries a `CLAUDE.md` the app writes and keeps current: a condensed, agent-facing rendition of the schema — the folder layout, ordering arithmetic, creating and moving cards, the `.trash/` convention, `attachments/`, `modified-by` self-stamping, the colour and icon palettes, and the git etiquette — so any file-capable agent dropped into the folder already knows how to work the board. It is app-owned and version-gated by a marker in its first line: rewritten when missing or older, left byte-for-byte alone when current or newer, and re-checked on every reload, so a guide deleted or rolled back from outside heals by itself. A `CLAUDE.md` that isn't the app's is never clobbered — it moves to `CLAUDE.user.md` (the user's own extension point, which the app otherwise never touches), and if that name is taken the app simply doesn't write a guide. A symlink or folder wearing the name is left alone, and a board on a read-only volume is skipped in silence: the guide is a courtesy and never an interruption.
- **Accessibility** — the board is a real VoiceOver surface, not a grid of unlabelled rectangles: lanes are containers read as "⟨title⟩, lane, N cards" (the count is the filter's, like the visible badge), each card is one flattened element carrying its title, its attachment count and its cut-pending state, and traversal follows card `order` rather than masonry column position. VO-Space toggles selection through the same funnel a ⌘-click uses, context-menu rows double as custom actions, lane titles are headings for the rotor, and the trash column pins last. A **live board announces itself**: a foreign edit lands as one polite, non-interrupting digest per reload — "Board changed: 2 cards edited, 1 card added" — while the app's own writes stay silent, and a card that disappears under the cursor is named rather than merely lost ("Card 'Fix login' was deleted externally"), with focus recovering to its lane; when the lane went too, the announcement names the *lane* and its count and focus walks up then sideways to whatever now holds its position. Bracketed operations say one thing at completion and never their internal churn, and the banner strip is an announced element in its own right — the read-only lock and reload breakage speak when they appear and when they clear. **Every size in the app is relative**: there is not one hard-coded point size left — the card face, the lane header, the masonry, the style editor's wells and every window's floor derive from the system body font, so the whole board grows with the system text size while the no-horizontal-scroll rule holds (the lanes compress, the strip never scrolls) and titles keep truncating gracefully. The system's visual accommodations are wired throughout: **Increase Contrast** thickens every border and selection ring and gives card and lane plates an outline they don't otherwise have, **Reduce Transparency** turns the transient search bar's glass and the trash column's washes solid, and **Reduce Motion** has a variant for every animated surface in the app — movement goes instant, appear/disappear goes crossfade, uniformly, the live-reload seam included. Nothing is ever said by colour alone (selection is a ring plus a trait, a cut card is dimmed plus "cut, pending paste", the trash header is hatched plus labelled, a mixed batch reads "mixed"), and under **Full Keyboard Access** the board is a single visible tab stop with the arrow grammar inside it while every control around it — lane buttons, popovers, the style grids, welcome rows, template tiles — is Tab-reachable, arrow-navigable and labelled.
- **Accessibility** — the board is a real VoiceOver surface, not a grid of unlabelled rectangles: lanes are containers read as "⟨title⟩, lane, N cards" (the count is the filter's, like the visible badge), each card is one flattened element carrying its title, its attachment count and its cut-pending state, and traversal follows card `order` rather than masonry column position. VO-Space toggles selection through the same funnel a ⌘-click uses, context-menu rows double as custom actions, lane titles are headings for the rotor, and the trash column pins last. A **live board announces itself**: a foreign edit lands as one polite, non-interrupting digest per reload — "Board changed: 2 cards edited, 1 card added" — while the app's own writes stay silent, and a card that disappears under the cursor is named rather than merely lost ("Card 'Fix login' was deleted externally"), with focus recovering to its lane; when the lane went too, the announcement names the *lane* and its count and focus walks up then sideways to whatever now holds its position. Bracketed operations say one thing at completion and never their internal churn, and the banner strip is an announced element in its own right — the read-only lock and reload breakage speak when they appear and when they clear. **Every size in the app is relative**: there is not one hard-coded point size left — the card face, the lane header, the masonry, the style editor's wells and every window's floor derive from the system body font, so the whole board grows with the system text size while the no-horizontal-scroll rule holds (the lanes compress, the strip never scrolls) and titles keep truncating gracefully. The system's visual accommodations are wired throughout: **Increase Contrast** thickens every border and selection ring and gives card and lane plates an outline they don't otherwise have, **Reduce Transparency** turns the transient search bar's glass and the trash column's washes solid, and **Reduce Motion** has a variant for every animated surface in the app — movement goes instant, appear/disappear goes crossfade, uniformly, the live-reload seam included. **A coloured board computes its own text colour.** The board background is the one surface the app lets a colour sit behind text, so the ink is chosen rather than assumed: WCAG relative luminance against the ≥ 4.5:1 threshold, with an `#RRGGBBAA` value composited over the window background of the appearance you are actually in — so lane and trash headers take light or dark glyphs on their own and re-decide the moment you switch to Dark Mode. One path serves both halves of the styling vocabulary: the twelve palette wells are pinned by a test that checks the ink the app *picks* for each of them in both appearances (a dark palette board is now readable in Light Mode, which it was not), and a hand-written hex — which stays fully honoured from disk — gets the identical computation as it renders. Nothing is ever said by colour alone (selection is a ring plus a trait, a cut card is dimmed plus "cut, pending paste", the trash header is hatched plus labelled, a mixed batch reads "mixed"), and under **Full Keyboard Access** the board is a single visible tab stop with the arrow grammar inside it while every control around it — lane buttons, popovers, the style grids, welcome rows, template tiles — is Tab-reachable, arrow-navigable and labelled.
## Development