Cometchat A11y

## Purpose

Accessibility for CometChat integrations. Out-of-the-box, the UI Kit components are mostly accessible — the kit's own buttons, inputs, and lists ship with semantic markup. Production gaps appear in the wiring **around** the kit: custom call surfaces, navigation, focus management on screen transitions, and contrast in custom themes.

Target: **WCAG 2.1 AA**. The skill writes code that meets this baseline.

---

## The five gaps that trip integrations (any family)

1. **Color contrast in custom themes.** A brand color picked for "looks nice in the brand book" may be 3.2:1 against the text — fails AA's 4.5:1 minimum.
2. **Focus management on chat screen entry.** Tab/screen reader user lands on the chat screen but focus stays on the previous trigger button. They have to manually navigate into the message list every time.
3. **No live region announcement for new messages.** Screen reader users don't know a new message arrived unless they navigate the message list and hear the new item.
4. **Keyboard-only users can't navigate the conversation list.** Click handlers bound to `<div>` instead of `<button>` skip keyboard events.
5. **Reduced-motion users see decorative animations.** Typing-indicator dots, message bubble entrance animations, transition effects — should respect `prefers-reduced-motion`.

This skill addresses each one across families.

---

## 1. Color contrast — the theme audit

CometChat themes are CSS variables (web/RN) or color tokens (native/Flutter). Override a single color and you might fail AA.

### Web / Angular — CSS variable contrast check

```ts
// scripts/check-contrast.ts (run in CI or as a one-shot)
function contrastRatio(hex1: string, hex2: string): number {
  const luminance = (hex: string) => {
    const rgb = hex.match(/\w\w/g)!.map(c => parseInt(c, 16) / 255).map(c =>
      c <= 0.03928 ? c / 12.92 : ((c + 0.055) / 1.055) ** 2.4
    );
    return 0.2126 * rgb[0] + 0.7152 * rgb[1] + 0.0722 * rgb[2];
  };
  const l1 = luminance(hex1);
  const l2 = luminance(hex2);
  return (Math.max(l1, l2) + 0.05) / (Math.min(l1, l2) + 0.05);
}

// Pull the values from your CSS variables
const fg = getComputedStyle(document.documentElement).getPropertyValue("--cometchat-text-color").trim();
const bg = getComputedStyle(document.documentElement).getPropertyValue("--cometchat-background-color").trim();
const ratio = contrastRatio(fg, bg);
if (ratio < 4.5) {
  console.warn(`Text/background contrast ${ratio.toFixed(2)}:1 fails WCAG AA (need ≥4.5:1)`);
}
```

In CI, add this to your test suite. The skill writes a starter version into `tests/a11y/contrast.test.ts`.

### React Native / native / Flutter — manual audit at theme-design time

Use a contrast-checker tool (browser extensions, https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/) on the theme tokens before shipping. There's no runtime DOM to audit on native.

The kit's default theme tokens pass AA. Custom palettes need the audit.

**Common fail:** brand purple #6750A4 against white background = 6.6:1 (passes). Same purple against `#F0F0F0` light gray = 5.7:1 (passes). Same purple against `#999999`