[FEAT] Session status in the desktop sidebar is encoded by colour alone — add a shape/glyph channel

Summary

In the Claude desktop app, each session in the sidebar carries a small status dot. The dots differ only by hue — same size, same filled-circle shape. At that size, several of the states are hard to tell apart, and there is no non-colour cue to fall back on.

Requesting that each status get a distinct glyph, with colour kept as reinforcement rather than as the only signal.

Why this is worth doing beyond the accessibility case

Colour-only encoding is a WCAG 2.1 SC 1.4.1 (Use of Colour) failure, so it affects users with any form of colour vision deficiency — roughly 1 in 12 men, 1 in 200 women. But it is not only an accessibility issue: at ~8px, distinguishing hue between two adjacent small circles is a hard visual task for anyone. I have normal colour vision and still cannot reliably read the sidebar at a glance. A shape channel makes the list scannable for everybody, which is the actual point of a status indicator.

Shape is also more robust than colour to things outside the app's control — display colour profiles, night-shift/blue-light filters, screen recordings and screenshots, and low-brightness settings all degrade hue discrimination while leaving silhouette intact.

Suggested shapes

Any distinct set works; the constraint is that the silhouettes must be separable at ~8–12px, not just different in the design file:

| State | Glyph |
|---|---|
| Running | spinner / partial arc |
| Idle | filled circle (current behaviour) |
| Requires action | exclamation mark, or bell |
| Completed | tick |
| Error / failed | cross |

Keeping "idle" as the plain dot means the common case looks unchanged and only the states you actually need to notice gain a distinct silhouette.

Existing settings do not cover this

The theme setting accepts dark-daltonized and light-daltonized ("Dark/Light mode (colorblind-friendly)"), so I went looking there first. Those do not affect the sidebar: in the desktop app bundle (2.1.212 era), daltonized appears exactly once, inside the shared settings-schema validation list, with no styling code behind it. The daltonized palettes shift terminal-side colours — diff red/green in particular — and leave the app chrome alone. So there is currently no setting, theme, or configuration path that addresses the sidebar dots.

I would rather see the shape channel added unconditionally than see a colourblind mode added for the sidebar. A mode is a setting users have to discover, and this particular readability problem is not confined to the users who would think to go looking for an accessibility toggle.

Related

• #6649 — [Colorblind] Add Clear Visual Indicator for Selected Slash Command. Same pattern (state carried by colour with no shape fallback) in the TUI slash-command picker. Closed, but the sidebar is a separate surface and was not covered by it.
• #35753, #32880 — colourblind-friendly theme palette problems. Adjacent, but those are about tuning which colours the daltonized themes use; this issue is about adding a second, non-colour encoding channel.

Environment

• Claude desktop app on macOS (Darwin 25.6.0)
• Claude Code 2.1.212