Home page: widespread WCAG AA color-contrast failures in dark mode

[BaggersIO]

Summary

The home page (/) fails axe's WCAG 2.1 AA color-contrast check in dark mode with 66 affected nodes, spanning at least the quick-start and rules-drift-prevention components (muted/small text using gray tokens like #898c8f on #25272a, #56585b on #171819 - ratios as low as 2.49:1 against a 4.5:1 requirement).

How this was found

While building Story 13.3 (navigation e2e viewport matrix, thymian-internal#470), the new matrix suite scans every route in light AND dark mode. The existing e2e/accessibility.spec.ts only ever scanned Home in light mode - this is the first time Home has been axe-scanned in dark mode, and it surfaced a genuine, pre-existing gap unrelated to the navigation work.

Scope note

This is unrelated to Epic 13 (site navigation/chrome) and was not introduced by it. Fixing it requires actual design rework of muted-text color tokens across multiple unrelated marketing components, which is out of scope for the navigation epic. Filed here for separate triage rather than silently skipped or bundled into an unrelated PR.

Repro

npx astro build
npx playwright test --project=mobile-chromium -g "no violations, dark"

(from astro-docs/, on the story/468-13-468-navigation-data-model-three-band-desktop-header branch / thymian-internal#468 PR - the matrix suite will be upstreamed to main once that PR merges)

[BaggersIO]

Additional finding (Story 13.3 V2 = 810px band)

Testing the 800-1152px viewport band surfaced two more pre-existing, unrelated issues, same root cause as the original report (widths/themes never axe-scanned before):

1. Home, light, .lifecycle-scroll-fade (scrollable-region-focusable): same class of issue as the original report, same component (lifecycle-grid) - fixed directly (added tabindex="0", zero visual change) since it's the identical trivial remediation already applied to the other 4 scrollable elements in this PR.
2. Enterprise page, light AND dark, color-contrast (9 nodes): .ep-incident-card--red, .ep-severity--red, and related "incident card" elements - red-on-white/red-on-dark text as low as 2.44:1 against a 4.5:1 requirement. This is a genuine color/design fix (the red severity palette needs actual rework), not a one-line accessibility-attribute fix like the others - left unfixed and skipped in the nav epic's test suite pending separate triage.

Still unrelated to and not introduced by Epic 13 (site navigation).