The Ember palette has 3 oranges. Two of them are fine as text on the near-black background:
#E87811primary, 6.92:1#EF8B2Esecondary, 8.16:1#9E642Eaccent, 4.19:1
WCAG AA wants 4.5:1 for normal-size text. The accent misses it. Not by a lot, which is the problem. 4.19 against 4.5 is invisible to the eye, especially on a dark background where everything already reads as high contrast because the surroundings are black.
I did not catch this by looking. I caught it by running the numbers on all 7 tokens at once, which took less time than arguing about any one of them.
The colour is not deleted. It is genuinely useful for the things it is used for: it appears once, in the edge glow behind the page, where it is a large soft field and never carries information. That is a legitimate role. The mistake would be reaching for it later for a label or a caption because it is in the palette and it looks nice against the cards.
So the rule got written where it cannot be missed, in the comment block at the top of theme.css next to the token itself:
accent #9E642E 4.19:1 FAILS AA for body text
decorative use only, never as textA palette is a set of colours plus a set of permissions. If the permissions live in a document nobody opens, they do not exist. Put them next to the value.
I would still rather have measured all 7 on day 1 than found this on a shipped page.