Accessibility Tip of the Day 101: Don't remove the underline on links. This is another controversial opinion, because it's pretty common on the web to see links that are just blue text without an underline. Slack, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Twitter, and pretty much everyone does this.
Even the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) don't specifically recommend against this practice as long as the link text color has a 3:1 color contrast ratio against the surrounding non-link text and as long as the underline appears on focus and hover.
(But, interestingly enough, they DO show the underline on links on the actual WCAG docs, so they follow this better practice themselves.)
So, why is this a problem? Sighted users with vision deficiencies may have trouble recognizing what is a link and what isn't. In the screenshot below, you see a Wikipedia page shown with normal vision on the left and then with Monochromacy emulated on the right. On the right, you can't distinguish the links from the rest of the text. This is the problem with using color alone to convey meaning.
Monochromacy is pretty rare (1 in 33,000 people), but even people with other types of color blindness may struggle with this problem, though not as badly, depending on the colors used.
#accessibility #a11y #accessibilityTipOfTheDay
