Establish Amnion’s visual language and accessibility contract #5

Context

The product target is shoulder-surfing a capable engineer who works quietly, signals meaningful blockers, and provides evidence on request. PR #2 establishes the first calm vocabulary and Quiet/Summary/Detailed/Debug policy, but accessibility and visual rules need an enforceable contract.

Scope

Define and test:

• semantic status and attention vocabulary;
• restrained color use with monochrome/limited-color terminal behavior;
• keyboard discoverability and focus/selection clarity;
• narrow terminal layout and wrapping/truncation rules;
• screen-reader/plain-text considerations where practical;
• verbosity policy that cannot hide blockers, failures, stale state, conflicts, or missing authority;
• snapshot/golden or semantic rendering evidence for key lifecycle states;
• a review rubric that keeps “shoulder-surfing a 10x engineer” an enforceable UX principle rather than an aesthetic slogan.

Non-goals

No generalized theming engine, animation-heavy dashboard, color-only status semantics, or web/Electron frontend.

Acceptance criteria

1. Every status and attention state has a stable textual label and non-color cue.
2. Monochrome and narrow-width TestBackend cases remain legible without panic.
3. Controls and verbosity levels are discoverable and documented.
4. Quiet mode suppresses noise but never suppresses meaningful blockers/failures.
5. Golden/semantic evidence covers representative active, waiting, failed, stale, unavailable, conflicting, and authoritative-ready states.
6. Review guidance explicitly rejects log-firehose, fake confidence, and dashboard-counter patterns.

Dependencies

PR #2 current vocabulary and UI; future drill-down views should follow this contract.

Validation expectations

Run rendering/view-model tests across widths and color modes, cargo fmt/test/Clippy, and Decapod validation. Review terminal captures as part of PR evidence.

Related: #2