Suggestion - Change Link Color

Question

I was reading this question - How to make my pasta less brown? - particularly Michael's answer. He links to a recipe of his. However, I only knew there was a link there was because I read his answer and expected a link, not because I could see it. Can we change the link color to stand out just a little more?

Update: Okay, to be fair I'm red/green color "deficient" (not blind). To put it in perspective, I need more contrast because the plain text and link look nearly identical to me. I can't see any of the numbers here - http://colorvisiontesting.com/ . I have to really stare right at the link in Michael's question to tell it apart and I'm not exaggerating. It's good that you underline on hover, but how do I know where to hover in the first place? In any case, this is one of those random design things. If 99% of users like the styling and its current usability, then no need to change it on my account. If other people, with normal vision, have a problem with it, then I think the color should be changed to increase contrast. I asked the question because I don't know what other people see, but apparently it contrasts enough. My only other comment is that in lieu of changing the color, if people would just paste the link directly (as I did above), rather than applying the link to some other text then I have no problem since I can easily pick a link out with its slashes and what not.

Update 2 So, regardless of if the styling is changed on the site I can use Personalized Web, a Chrome extension, to change the link color for just the relevant text. If anyone else is interested, these rules worked for me and apply to questions on both the main site and the Meta area:

URL Match: ^.*cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/
Add CSS: .post-text a, .comment-copy a { color:blue !important;}

Answer 1

This makes a lot more sense to me now that I understand it to be an issue of colour-blindness (or colour deficiency). It's probably protanopia that we're talking about here (missing red cones). Here's a simulation from vischeck:

It's actually pretty bad. I'm not sure how much we care about accessibility but this specific issue affects something like 1% of the population - so maybe not an emergency but not anything to handwave away either.

I do like the style, but this is exactly why the original designers of the web chose to underline links; it's not pretty but it's easy to spot.

It's at least worth thinking about possible compromises between aesthetics and accessibility.

Answer 2

Chad, we take accessibility pretty seriously. Thank you for bringing this issue to our attention. For the link color choice, I originally use this tool to check color contrast and it seemed the link color passed the test

http://www.snook.ca/technical/colour_contrast/colour.html

But now I realize the problem isn't that the link color is hard for color blind people to read, but it's too similar to regular body text.

I will add an underline to the links in the question/comment post section.

Answer 3

Could you have a browser style sheet that's overriding the site's default colors? In Chrome I'm seeing red (image below), even after visiting the link.