A button label nobody could read, on nine pages

We have been working through the site measuring every colour pairing against the WCAG AA readability standard. This round turned up twenty failures, and one was bad enough to call out on its own.

A button label was rendering at a contrast ratio of 1.48 to 1 against its background, on nine different pages. The standard asks for at least 4.5 to 1. At 1.48 the text is very nearly the same colour as the thing it sits on — readable on a good monitor in a dark room, and close to invisible on a phone outdoors.

It had survived earlier rounds of this work for an unglamorous reason: that colour was written in a format our checker did not recognise, so every automated pass had quietly skipped straight over it. Fixing the checker is what found it.

The rest of the round covers pairings where text was fine against its own panel but failed against the background showing through behind it — a real pairing, and an easy one to miss when you only ever check one layer at a time.

Nothing moved and nothing was restyled. The colours are simply readable now.