Admin bar flyout text fails contrast in the Light color scheme

[josephfusco]

Live-tested with Playwright + axe-core against the actual rendered page, not source-derived. Part of the #138 audit.

Fresh scheme (default) — flyout text is legible:

Light scheme — the same text washes out against the white flyout background:

axe measured .presence-bar-you, the group labels ("On this page"/"Elsewhere"), and .presence-bar-screen (#a7aaad) at 2.33:1 against the flyout background in Light scheme (needs 4.5:1 for normal text). The "N online" count text fails too, at 2.92:1, inheriting core's Light-scheme link color on non-link text. Fresh scheme: zero contrast violations.

Cause: WordPress's Light color scheme sets .ab-submenu to a white background (wp-admin/css/colors/light/colors.scss); every other built-in scheme keeps it dark. includes/admin-bar.php's inline CSS hardcodes #a7aaad for this text rather than using a scheme-aware value, so it was only ever tuned against the dark background.

Scope note: only Fresh and Light were tested directly. The other six built-in schemes (Blue, Coffee, Ectoplasm, Midnight, Ocean, Sunrise) all keep the dark submenu like Fresh and are presumed unaffected, not verified individually.

Fix direction: use a color that holds 4.5:1 against both a dark and a white background (e.g. a darker gray, still muted but scheme-agnostic), or read the scheme's actual submenu-background variable if WP core exposes one.

Use of AI Tools

AI assistance: Yes
Tool(s): Claude Code
Model(s): Claude Sonnet 5
Used for: Assisting with investigation, live browser verification, and drafting

[akira-in-tech]

I would like to work on this. I plan to update the admin-bar text colors so they meet WCAG AA contrast against both the default dark submenu and the Light scheme, then verify the change with the existing test and E2E tooling.