Help conversations stay live, and clearer sign-in and status labels

This week's note is a reliability fix for help-request conversations, plus two accessibility improvements to how the sign-in screen and status labels read.

Help-request conversations no longer go quiet without warning

If a help-request conversation was left open in a browser tab for an extended stretch, that tab could stop receiving live updates, with nothing on screen to show anything had gone wrong. It happened because the background checks that keep a conversation live (the ones that poll for new messages without a full page reload) were not being refreshed the same way the rest of the page is, so a long-idle tab's connection could quietly expire. Once that happened, new messages sent into that conversation would not appear in that tab until it was reloaded.

This is now fixed: the same refresh that keeps the rest of the page active now also covers these background checks, so a conversation window does not go stale just because it has been open for a while.

What did not change: no messages were lost. A message sent into an affected conversation was still delivered and stored normally; the only effect was that one open tab would not show it until refreshed. Reloading the page, or opening the conversation in a new tab, always worked. Nothing about who can see a conversation, or how sign-in works, changed.

Screen readers now find one clear main content area on the sign-in page

The student sign-in page was structured with two nested "main content" sections instead of one, which could confuse a screen reader user trying to jump straight to the page's main content. The page now presents a single, correctly nested main content area, and looks exactly the same on screen as it did before.

Status labels such as "Urgent" are now easier to read

Coloured status labels on help requests, including "Urgent", used text colours that did not always meet our accessibility contrast standard against their background, particularly in dark mode. The text on these labels is now darker against its background so it is easier to read at a glance, meeting the contrast standard we publish. The labels themselves are the same colour; only the text on them changed.