ADR-0076: Home is six actions, and an Identification route that is not built is absent rather than disabled

Status: Accepted — amends ADR-0030, which stands Date: 2026-09-20

Decisions

D-154 Home carries exactly six action cards, and everything else moves to chrome

Scan QR, manual search, PPE, First Aid, Spill Response and the Conversational surface. Each is a card with a label, a one-line description and a bundled icon. Recently viewed and Settings leave Home for the navigation bar (D-157): they are destinations, not actions, and they were competing for attention with the six things a Handler opens this application to do.

The count is a ruling about Home, not about the product's surfaces. Nothing here removes a route, and a surface that is not a Home card is not thereby demoted — Escalation is on every screen (D-100) and is on no card at all.

D-155 An Identification route that has no surface is absent from Home, not shown disabled

D-62 makes QR, camera text recognition and manual search co-equal Identification routes. It is about routes that exist. A route whose surface has not been built is shown nowhere: not as a disabled tile, not as a greyed card, not as a coming-soon line.

Camera text recognition is that route today — Risks item 1 is open, CAS-number reading has never been tried against photographs of real drum labels, and those photographs do not exist. When the spike passes and the surface is built, camera text returns to Home as a peer and Home carries seven cards. The six is the shape of today, not a ceiling.

Context

A Handler tested the prototype and reported Home as the screen they could not read. Home carried nine entries in two groups, one of them permanently disabled with an explanation of why.

The disabled tile was put there deliberately, and for a good reason: rendering it visibly differently from the QR entry was how the screen avoided saying that QR is camera text's fallback, which D-62 forbids. What the prototype showed is that the reason does not survive contact. A control that cannot be pressed teaches one thing — this application has parts that do not work — and it teaches it on the first screen, before a Handler has seen anything that does.

Decision

Home shows six action cards. The camera text recognition route is absent until its surface exists, at which point it returns as a seventh card, peer to the other two. D-62's "no route is the fallback of another" is unchanged and continues to bind every route that is on the screen.

Rejected options

• Keep the disabled tile (the shape the prototype had) — rejected: the owner's ruling is that a control that does nothing is worse than an absence, because a Handler reads it as the product being broken rather than as a route being honest about itself. The peer sentence above the group was doing work no Handler read.
• Drop the camera route entirely and collapse D-62 to two peers — rejected: it would tombstone D-64 and close Risks item 1 as won't-do, discarding the one Identification route that answers the emergency case ADR-0030 was written for, the unfamiliar container nobody labelled.
• Keep it off Home but reachable from the Search screen's miss state — rejected: that is precisely "QR and search are the real routes, camera is the fallback", the sentence D-62 exists to forbid, reintroduced through a placement rather than through words.
• One "Scan" card opening a chooser — rejected: it puts both camera routes one level below search, and "reachable from Home at the same level" is what D-62 requires.

This ruling may not be re-decided

If your change contradicts an Accepted ADR: stop and raise it. Do not implement over it. Superseding requires a new ADR that says so; never edit an Accepted one.

Consequences

Home is readable at a glance and every card on it does something. The identification group's explanatory sentence — that all routes are peers — loses its reason to exist while only one camera route is on screen, and returns with the camera card.

What becomes hard: nothing on Home now records that camera text recognition is intended. That fact lives in D-62 and in Risks item 1, and a reader of the screen alone cannot see it. This ADR is where it is written down, which is the trade being made.

Coverage

No upstream finding lands here. The ruling came from a Handler's prototype test on 2026-09-20 and from the collision that test exposed between a disabled control and D-62 (D-104).