It's not a coincidence that the Nielsen-Norman Group also names blue the safest link color choice in its Beyond Blue Links: Making Clickable Elements Recognizable article. It's a very basic styling for sure, but it's still styling: the underlined blue links are well-known and internet users can easily recognize them. For example, this is how the homepage of the Mozilla Developer Network looks like in Chrome: You can check it out by disabling all additional CSS styles using the Web Developer browser add-on or another dev tool. Web browsers come with a default link styling that meets these requirements. The link must present a "non-color designator" (typically the introduction of the underline) on both mouse hover and keyboard focus.The link text must have a 3:1 contrast ratio from the surrounding non-link text.Accessible links according to WCAG 2.0Īccording to WebAIM's guidelines about links and hypertext, WCAG 2.0 has two additional requirements for body text links: Don't read it as a guideline but rather an experiment for understanding what can be done for more accessible links. In this article, I'll only speak about the first group: body text links. When we speak about links, we usually think of the classic blue links with an underline, however there are actually different kinds of links, such as: It's also possible to overdo it by using too many visual signifiers that might confuse the user.
ACCESSIBLE COLORS HOW TO
However, it's not always easy to find out how to create accessible links that match your website design. Partly because users with low vision, color deficiency, and other visual impairments can't always recognize this kind of link, but also because it's easier for regular users to skim through the content if links are better emphasized. Most frequently, they only distinguish links by color, which makes it hard for users with visual disabilities to spot them in text blocks - even if high color contrast is used.Īs a rule of thumb, accessible links shouldn't rely solely on colors. However, designers often don't understand what it takes to make links accessible. Link accessibility is one of the most important aspects of usability.
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