Signal Amber means something changed underneath you — regression, drift, live-differs, a stalled poll. It is not the severity scale. Severity is a measurement; regression is an alarm. Roughly 5% of any screen.
Every severity, status, staleness and confidence encoding carries a glyph or shape and a text label. Colour is the third channel, never the first. The tool that audits colour dependence cannot depend on colour.
A solid border means the value is written to the version record. A dashed border means advisory — recheck results, Jira mirrors, reserved statuses. The border tells you what has authority.
Status is drawn from an open set. Two reserved slots (needs-review, accepted-risk) are specified now so Theme E lands without a redesign.
Light is Hestia's warm paper, unchanged. Dark is an extension authored here — Hestia's guide defers it to phase two. Both hold AA at every pairing shown.
Same three families. Hestia's 16px body and 56px display are built for a landing page; an operator reading four hundred findings needs 13px rows. The display serif survives in one place only — summary statements and empty states.
A tool that audits focus states has to demonstrate one. The indicator is a 2px perimeter ring plus a 1px contrast collar, so it survives on paper, on white cards, and on the ink surfaces without a second variant.
Ninety token pairings were enumerated by hand, then every text node on this page — 658 of them — was swept against its real composited background, walking up the stack through each translucent layer rather than trusting the token value. All pass WCAG 2.1 SC 1.4.3 at 4.5:1 for text and SC 1.4.11 at 3:1 for the borders that carry state. Five token values moved to get there, and one cell needed an opaque base.
Hestia's Grid Line (#E3DED5) survives untouched as the decorative hairline — table rules, card edges, section dividers. Those are exempt from 1.4.11: no information is lost if they disappear. The moment a border becomes the thing that tells you a chip is authoritative rather than advisory, it stops being decoration and moves to the chip token. Both are in the specimen above, and the distinction is the reason the page still looks like Hestia after the audit.