Insufficient Text Contrast

That is the whole upstream rule — one bullet under "Color & Contrast" in the Rams review. The number is WCAG 1.4.3 Level AA: 4.5:1 for body text, relaxed to 3:1 for large text (18pt / 14pt bold and above). The reasoning here is ours. The failures are almost never the headline; they are the quiet text — captions, helper text, placeholders, timestamps, and "muted" secondary copy, where a designer reached for light gray on white to make the layout calmer.

Disabled controls are formally exempt from 1.4.3, but if the disabled label is the only thing telling a user why they cannot proceed, exempt is not the same as readable. Check with a contrast tool rather than by eye, and re-check in dark mode, where a token that passed on white can fail on near-black. This rule sets the floor for TEXT only. The parts of a control that are not text — an input outline, a checkbox in its off state, a focus ring, a chart line — are governed by design-non-text-contrast (WCAG 1.4.11), whose AA floor is 3:1, not 4.5:1. The two numbers are not in conflict; they measure different things.