Avatar

A person or device as a molded disc — the image seated in a well, or initials engraved into the plastic when there is no image or the image fails to load. The failure case is the whole point: a bare <img> with a broken URL leaves a hole, this falls back.

Feel A round inset portrait, or initials on molded plastic, with an optional presence LED that lights and goes dark over a moment.

Or let the agent fetch it: get_component("avatar") on the Echo MCP server.

Installation

npx echo-ui-cli add avatar

First time? Run npx echo-ui-cli init once — it sets the project up, and add refuses to run before it.

At a glance

Version: 0.3.0
Weight: 525 B · 788 B of CSS (minified and gzipped; React not counted)

Usage

tsx

import { Avatar } from "@/echo/avatar";

<Avatar src="/ada.jpg" name="Ada Lovelace" />

Composition

Avatar

Examples

With an image

name still required — it is the accessible name and the fallback source.

tsx

<Avatar src="/ada.jpg" name="Ada Lovelace" />

Initials only

Derived from the first and last words.

tsx

<Avatar name="Ada Lovelace" size="lg" />

Presence

A lit LED in the rim. Fill-vs-hollow carries the state, so it never rests on colour.

tsx

<Avatar name="Ada Lovelace" status="live" />

Device

Override initials when the name is not a person.

tsx

<Avatar name="Echo One, studio unit" initials="E1" />

Accessibility

role="img" named by name — with the status added (“Ada Lovelace, online”) when status is set.
The image and initials inside are aria-hidden, so the name is read once.
Presence is shown filled or hollow, not only by colour.

Tested against WCAG 2.2 AA on every release:

axe — No axe violations, in the component's own gallery and on its page.
keyboard — Every action is reachable and operable from the keyboard alone.
focus-visible — Focus is visible on every focusable part, in normal and forced-colors mode.
forced-colors — State stays visible when the look's colours are replaced by the system's.
target-size — Every target's real hit area is at least 24×24px, at every density.
reflow — Content reflows into 320px and survives a doubled text size.

Not covered: screen-reader: not yet verified by a person. Everything above is a machine check; a person has not yet driven this component with a screen reader.

Props

Avatar props
Prop	Type	Default
`src`Image URL. Omit to render initials.	`string`
`name` requiredWho or what this is; also the accessible name.	`string`
`size`xs inline with text (a mention, a byline), sm in lists and table rows, md the default, lg a card header, xl a profile header.	`"xs" \| "sm" \| "md" \| "lg" \| "xl"`	`"md"`
`initials`Override the derived initials, e.g. a device code.	`string`
`status`Presence LED in the rim: live is lit, idle is an empty socket. Appended to the accessible name.	`"live" \| "idle"`
`statusLabel`Override the words announced for status.	`string`

Anti-patterns

Never omit name to make it decorative — an avatar identifies someone, and an unnamed one is a hole in the a11y tree. If it is truly decorative, do not render an avatar.
Never put the name in an adjacent <img alt> as well; the inner image is alt="" on purpose so the wrapper's label is announced once, not twice.
Never use status for anything but presence. A lit LED on a person means they are there — not that they are selected, an admin, or new.
Never stack avatars into an overlapping row without giving the group its own label and count — a pile of individually-named discs reads as noise.

Changelog

v0.3.0 · 2026-10-12 · AddedThe drawn device (echo-ui-core, echo-ui-cli, every component that draws its own material). A seed's new render setting is molded (Echo as it has always been: plastic lit by one key light) or drawn: the same parts drawn in the ink, the way a spec sheet draws a key. Every part is outlined at one weight (--echo-line, --echo-line-width), hollow on the body; a raised part stands on a hard ink edge as deep as it rises and travels down it when pressed; a recess is an outline drawn inside; something floating stands on a deeper edge. There's no light, so no gloss, no soft shadow and no glow: what a molded device lights (an LED, the rail, a readout, the focus ring, a fader's knob, a radio's pip) is solid ink, and a low-emphasis action is its label underlined. In black and white (the accent the ink) "on" is solid ink and what's drawn on it inverts: a switch's thumb turns paper, a fader's knob is knocked out with a paper ring. The primary key is the paper key that stands highest, on an ink edge twice as deep as a neutral one's, the way a spec sheet draws its CTA. The accent stays the seed's own colour as a flat fill for what's on (a chosen segment, a checked box, a slider's travel, a switch that's on), so an acid highlighter is acid, not the olive a molded device holds it to; what's drawn on it is the ink, or the body when the accent is too deep for the ink. Pressing, travel, sound, what each material is for and every contrast guarantee are unchanged. npx echo-ui-cli style set render drawn turns it on; a style sets it in its seed; the published style and config schemas describe it, and DESIGN.md says how a drawn device builds. A molded device renders exactly as before: every line is 0px wide there, and each drawn value a component reads (--echo-drawn-fill, -on-fill, -ink, -rule, -glass, -hollow, -decoration) is initial, so it falls back to what the component always drew. HardwareButton's bed is the one new hand-tuned shadow: a drawn key stands on its own edge instead of being drawn in a recess.
v0.3.0 · 2026-10-12 · ChangedEvery item needs echo-ui-core 0.3.0 (all components). The drawn device, readability past AA and the design tests live in core, and the components that use them are built against it, so each item now declares echo-ui-core >=0.3.0 <0.4.0. Update core with the items: npm install echo-ui-core@^0.3.0 (or your package manager's), then npx echo-ui-cli update. An item whose files didn't change is the same code under a new version; the 0.2.0 files stay published.
v0.2.0 · 2026-10-04 · AddedThe light device (echo-ui-core, echo-ui-cli). Echo can be light: a pale chassis makes a device molded in light plastic, like a white calculator or a cream radio, and a dark one makes the device Echo has always been. There's no setting and no mode to switch; the chassis decides (devicePolarity, and values.polarity on the theme). On a light device the page is light: its ground, the well, is the body barely set in. Caps get their own ladder, a step lighter than the body with a lit rim that stops short of white, so they keep their bevel; undersides and seams are shaded darker; dim text moves toward the ground by the same step as on a dark device, and reads about 6:1 on it. Screens are paper glass printed in ink, because a glow on a pale body is a smudge. What's lit (an LED, the current rail) is still the accent, held to 3:1 on every ground, so on is brighter than off; the text it prints (a readout, a count, a current tab) and the focus ring are the accent's ink, a step deeper and held to AA, in the new accent-ink role. The primary cap is the same cap as a dark device's, the accent with a light label: its label is the new primary-cap-ink role, and progress cells, loader dots and a meter's fill, the same plastic, read 3:1 on the page. A neutral cap or a slider that fills with it under its own dark label fills with the new pour-* roles, the accent's pale stops. Shadows are drawn at half their weight, in a deep colour of the body's own hue (--echo-cast-ink) instead of black. Every guarantee holds as it does on a dark device, and the contrast sweep now runs on light bodies too. A dark seed makes exactly the theme it did before, and the new roles equal the ones they stand for there. The components that mixed a recess toward black, painted paper in the text colour or lit a pillow of light with it read the theme's new --echo-shade-ink, --echo-paper-stock and --echo-paper-ink instead, with the old value as the fallback, and a reflective screen reads --echo-screen-*; the components that print a lit label read --echo-primary-cap-ink and --echo-accent-ink the same way; every rail is drawn in the glow, and every focus ring, the ring recipes included, in the ink. style use wears a light style now, and style check says which device a style makes. A dark screen tint on a light body is still refused: one text colour can't serve both, and the theme says so.
v0.2.0 · 2026-10-04 · AddedOne size on everything with a height. Field, Select, NumberField, OtpField and Segmented take size="sm" | "md" | "lg" (32, 44 or 60px), matching HardwareButton, and all of them read a SizeProvider around them. md is exactly what they were. Avatar gains xs (inline with a line of text) and xl (a profile header).
v0.2.0 · 2026-10-04 · ChangedComments only, no behaviour change. Comments in the component source used to cite documents, milestones and ticket numbers from Echo's own planning, none of which exist in your project. The citations are gone and the sentences around them stay. Where a comment was only a citation, it now says what it meant. Three development warnings (HardwareButton's engraved/caption checks and StatusDot's missing-label check) also dropped the ticket code at the end of the message. echo-ui diff will show changes in most items; none of them are to code.
v0.2.0 · 2026-10-04 · ChangedAn item's version is now a function of declared data, not of how the changelog is formatted. The version an item ships under is published once and never rewritten, and it used to be inferred from prose: a regex for a bolded "Breaking" run across the whole unreleased section, and attribution by "does a bullet mention this name in backticks". One breaking entry therefore moved every item that changed that cycle, and an entry explaining that "Menu and Sheet are unchanged here" filed itself as a change to Menu and Sheet — which it really had.
v0.2.0 · 2026-10-04 · ChangedThe agent brief says Echo has not shipped. llms.txt and the MCP server's instructions led with npx echo-ui-cli init, and that name on npm is a reserved stub with no executable — so a model following the brief wrote an install step that fails with npx's own error. The brief now opens with the caveat, and the docs carry it on every surface that shows a command. One switch (CLI_RELEASED) silences all of them at launch, and a test refuses to let one move without the others. Affects all components only in what the brief says about installing them; no item's props, CSS or rendered semantics change.
v0.2.0 · 2026-10-04 · ChangedEcho's home is echo-ui.com. The registry, the docs and the packages all move to it from echo.nawwara.studio. Nothing was published under the old host, so no echo.json anywhere points at it and there is nothing to migrate — this is the last release where that is true.
v0.2.0 · 2026-10-04 · ChangedWeights, line heights, letter-spacing, z-index, border widths and icon sizes come from the theme scales in all components, with the old value as a fallback, so components keep working with echo-ui-core@0.0.1. Strays moved to the nearest step: most by under a pixel; HardwareButton icons are 14/16/20px (were 15/17/19).
v0.2.0 · 2026-10-04 · FixedA light device's recesses keep the body's hue in Chromium (echo-ui-core, BUG-166). Chromium drops the hue of a colour under 0.02 chroma when it mixes in oklch, and draws the mix at hue 0, a rose. A light device's plastic is that grey, so on a lilac body every field, track and rail was pink. A mix made only of greys is made in oklab now, which has no hue to lose; a mix with an accent in it stays in oklch. On a dark device nothing you can see changes.
v0.2.0 · 2026-10-04 · FixedContent now reflows into a 320px screen (400% zoom) and survives a doubled browser text size (WCAG 1.4.10, 1.4.4), across all components. Select's 180px floor, NumberField's readout, Segmented and Steps as flex items, EmptyState's grid columns, and Avatar's fixed-pixel disc all gave way; Panel counts its padding inside a width you set (box-sizing: border-box), so a <Panel style={{ width: 220 }}> is now 220px wide overall rather than 260px.

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