Attention accommodations

Desktop Material provides five independently toggleable interface accommodations in Settings → Attention accommodations. They are all off by default, persist locally, and do not diagnose, assess, or make a medical claim about the person using the app.

Modes

Focus de-emphasizes inactive workspace regions after focus moves to an active region. It never removes content; the inactive region remains available through its existing controls.
Low stimulation reduces non-essential animation, transition timing, colour saturation, and visual noise. The operating system's prefers-reduced-motion preference remains authoritative and is respected in addition to this setting.
Time awareness displays elapsed time in the current renderer session and the time since the most recent recorded activity. These are factual labels, not alarms or productivity scores.
One thing at a time keeps one user-entered next action visible. The text is bounded to 240 characters, stored locally, and remains until the user changes or clears it.
Momentum offers a non-blocking prompt after fifteen minutes without activity. Dismissing it records a defer interval and does not show another prompt until that interval ends.

Persistence and privacy

The versioned attention-accommodation-preferences record contains only the five booleans, the bounded next-action text, a defer timestamp, and the last settings-change timestamp. Invalid or future-shaped values are coerced to safe defaults. No network request is made and no activity text is exported or sent to diagnostics.

Accessibility and localization

Each mode is a keyboard-reachable checkbox with an accessible description. The next-action field and defer selector have labels and bounded native controls. Runtime facts use a polite status region; Momentum is dismissible and never blocks the workspace. English, playful Hong Kong Cantonese, and bilingual copy are selected through the existing language preference, with the existing per-language funny-level setting used only to choose framing copy. Facts, durations, and the user's next action remain unchanged by tone.

Failure boundaries

If local storage cannot be read, all modes resolve to their off-by-default values. If a next-action value is malformed or too long, it is trimmed or cleared rather than partially applied. A missing layout region is left fully usable; Focus never hides it. Momentum and Time awareness are non-blocking and can be unavailable without preventing the app from starting.

Verification status

The implementation, local persistence, English/Cantonese/bilingual copy, settings search, command-palette registration, and seven focused unit/UI tests are verified in app/test/unit/attention-accommodation-test.tsx. The focused test also removes one required mode from a copy of the hand-written five-mode inventory and verifies that the exact inventory check rejects it before validating the restored list. It also proves hidden overlays are excluded from Focus and focused descendants resolve to real top-level workspace regions.

The exact 74159be0d9d4da10254ad18873496bb9bd1f5928 production build was driven on a cheap-Lowlevel hidden Windows desktop with an isolated profile and disposable repository. Every mode was enabled, conditional controls were reached by keyboard, and a restart proved Focus kept the normally hidden repository-drop overlay invisible while Time awareness continued reporting live session and activity facts. Release packaging remains pending and is not implied by this unpackaged production-build evidence.