The first screen a dealer ever sees was the one nobody had looked at. Opened
fresh, with nothing saved, the tool showed:
* the word EMPTY, in capitals, ten times across the felt
* Resolve Pot as the accent-green primary — on a table with no players and no
pot, so the loudest control on screen was the one that could do least
* Next Hand, with no button to move
* no indication anywhere of what to do first, except a grey caption under the
felt saying "tap a seat to edit"
An empty state is the one screen a new user is guaranteed to meet, and this one
described itself ten times without once saying what to do.
**The felt stops repeating itself.** An open chair is already dashed instead of
solid, faded, and has no stack under it — that reads at a glance, which is how a
dealer looks at a felt, and it reads the same on the one open chair at a full
table, which is the case the label was actually for. The word is gone from all
ten, and the seat numbers underneath it are now the thing you see. What the word
carried for anyone reading by ear moves to an aria-label on the seat, which now
says more than the sighted version ever did: "Seat 3, empty", "Seat 1, Ann".
**The bar says what the table is.** It used to hide itself when nobody was
seated — silent at exactly the moment a dealer has never used this before. It
now says "Nobody's at the table yet." with one full-width button, Seat a player,
which opens the seat editor on the first free chair. That is the same panel
tapping a seat gives them, so the button teaches the gesture rather than
replacing it.
**Two dead controls stop pretending.** Resolve Pot and Next Hand are disabled
until somebody is at the table, which takes the accent green off the button that
cannot work and leaves the only green on screen on the one that can. Disabled
rather than hidden: hiding them would move the header the moment the first
player is named, and a control that vanishes teaches nothing about what it was
for. Next Hand's own explanatory title is kept and handed back when it
re-enables.
One bug of my own, found by walking the flow rather than by reading it: after
typing a name both header buttons stayed greyed out, still captioned "nobody is
at the table yet". commitSeatChange refreshes narrowly on purpose — a full
render on every keystroke takes the name field out from under the dealer
mid-word — and the comment directly above it already warns about this exact trap
for the action bar. The header needed the same line.
609 tests, 0 failures. 65 layout audits across 13 viewports x 5 table sizes,
0 failures — the empty table is now one of those sizes, and had never been
audited before. Re-verified with the network cut: the first-run screen, the CTA
and seating a player all work offline.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015bnp7xKUPFFSpwkYNFaPgb
Hold'em dealer tests
Unit tests for the money logic behind /Casino/TexasHoldem — the betting engine, the
side-pot calculator, the split calculator and the table state.
node --test tests/holdem/*.test.js
No install step, no package.json, no dependencies. The browser modules are plain
script-tag files that each end with a module.exports guard, so Node can require them
as-is; load.js puts them on globalThis under the same names they use to find each
other in the page, in the load order from TexasHoldem.cshtml.
What's covered
| File | Covers |
|---|---|
potCalculator.test.js |
Main and side pots, dead money, uncalled bets, odd-cent distribution |
betting.test.js |
Blinds, street completion, raises reopening the action, all-in run-outs |
state.test.js |
Button rotation, which seats post blinds, session standings |
splitCalculator.test.js |
Chopped pots, odd chips, unmakeable denominations |
invariants.test.js |
1000 randomised hands per property (see below) |
The layout audit
The unit tests above cover the money. uiAudit.js covers the thing you can only see
in a browser: whether a dealer can actually reach every control.
node tests/holdem/runUiAudit.js # needs Playwright and the site running
It checks WCAG AA contrast, touch target sizes, touch-action and tap highlights, that fields stay selectable and are large enough not to trigger iOS zoom, that nothing important is covered or off-screen with no way to scroll to it, that no grid column has collapsed to nothing, and that no text is painted outside its box. It runs over the table, all five overlays and Quick Split, at thirteen viewports from a 360px phone to a 1600px desktop and the same phones on their side — each viewport twice, once with a mouse and once with a thumb.
That last part, and two of those checks, are newer than this paragraph claiming them.
runAll() did not include the contrast check at all, and touch targets sat behind an
opt-in flag nothing passed, so "the audit is clean" meant nine checks rather than
eleven for a long run of rounds. Both were written and tested and simply never called.
The mouse/thumb pair matters for the same reason: the 44px rule stands itself down
where hover: hover says there is a pointer, and a headless desktop browser is a
pointer, so a single pass had never measured a touch target at any viewport. Between
them they found a 9px seat label at 3.39:1, a 37px-tall amount field and a 30px delete
button on Quick Split.
A check that decides it doesn't apply says so in the output rather than reporting no offenders, which reads identically to a pass. The same goes for the two exemptions that exist: a disabled control, which WCAG itself excuses, and a link inside a sentence, whose size is set by the line it sits in.
Deliberately not in CI: the unit suite is dependency-free and runs in a second, while
this one needs a browser and a running site. Run it after any change that adds or
resizes a control. With no Playwright to hand, paste uiAudit.js into devtools and
call LayoutAudit.runAll().
The contrast check is built so it cannot report a false positive: backgrounds
composite through alpha, and where a gradient is involved every colour stop is tried
and the most flattering one used. A finding means the text fails even under the
reading most generous to it. Two earlier attempts at this got it wrong in both
directions — one read only background-color and scored text on a gradient against
nothing, the other treated low-alpha stops as opaque — so uiAudit.js is checked
against known-answer cases before it is believed.
Touch targets are measured by probing outward with elementFromPoint rather than by
reading the element box, because the box lies in both directions: a small control can
be padded out with a transparent ::after and respond well beyond its painted size,
and a checkbox inside a label is hit by tapping the label. The 44px rule is only
enforced where hover: none says there's no mouse.
It exists because these checks were being re-typed into a console every time something changed, and each time they only covered whatever had just been touched. That is how the standings table shipped with a player-name column zero pixels wide and kept it for two rounds.
Why the randomised suite exists
Every correctness bug found in this tool so far has been shape-dependent: blinds posted to empty chairs, the button skipping past players, heads-up acting out of order, an overbet announced as a side pot. None of them show up on a full six-handed table with equal stacks, which is the table anyone writes a fixed example for.
invariants.test.js deals a thousand hands across random seat counts, random empty
chairs, random stack depths and random dealer input, and checks the things a dealer
would notice being wrong:
- chips are never created or destroyed during play
- the pot breakdown plus the uncalled returns always equal the money that went in
- paying the pot out settles it to the cent
- once uncalled chips are handed back, nobody is still betting above the whole table
- the button and both blinds always land on players who are actually in the hand
The generator is seeded, so a failure reproduces from the seed printed in the message rather than being a flake to re-run.