Background

mediawiki.ui has offered the full color palette to devs to use for stylesheets.
Devs/teams have used two different colors for subtle, toned down textual information:

1. Current choice @color-subtle with #54595d in WikimediaUI theme default, which also works on non-white backgrounds to fulfill color contrast requirements
2. Former @colorGray7 with #72777d.

Throughout Wikimedia codebases 2. is used in numerous places and the contrast between @color-base and @color-subtle is lower than before.
Problem I see: Base/Gray 700 has 2.27:1 to Gray 600. while 3.57:1 to Gray 500. In our “wall of text” interfaces, creators often long for muting secondary text in order to reduce load. And 3:1 is also working good enough, if not better for low-vision folks.

Goal

Evaluate if we can hold on to only color: #54595d in our environment.

Options:

1. Impose #54595d as subtle/complementary text color everywhere
   1. How could we go about this for best rollout performance? Don't want to roll this out on to repeat the same discussions 40 times.
2. Create a new token: e.g. color-subtler, color-deemphasized, color-complementary, color-muted, color-discreet?