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Re: Color contrast in links -- is it important?

for

From: Randall Pope2
Date: Apr 21, 2007 11:10AM

Hi Everyone,

I have been watching this list for quite sometimes and learned a lot of you
all. I'm Randall Pope who is deaf-blind (meaning that I'm both severely
hard of hearing and legally blind with some usable vision). I'm a webmaster
for the American Association of the Deaf-Blind and working on a new web
design which will be more accessible than the current one at http://aadb.org
. While I'm not happy with my first design, it was certainly a big learning
experience for me. I will get to some other accessible issues later. Now
the question on color contrast in links.

As a low vision person like myself, I feel there is a big need for color
contrast in the web design. As some of you may already know, less than 10%
of the legally blind population is actually total blind. I believe about
35% of the blind population use some kind of accessible devices such as JAWS
to access the information on the web but I'm not 100% sure about this. But
I do know a good number of low vision readers do use their vision without
any kind of assisting devices.

As a low vision user, my suggestion of the four states of the links in
regards to color contrast:

Link = very important. The underline does help but sometimes I cannot tell
the difference from a content underline from the link underline. Many
times, I have click on underline words only to find out that is not a link
after clicking on it several times, not to mention of being annoyed. Plus
the color contrast between the link and the content does help a lot.

Visited = important. Many times I get confused which page that I visit
because the website does not offer a different color. Also a contrasted
color background is a big help in finding the visited links.

Active = not important. I must confess that I don't quite understand the
purpose of having this function or make it work for accessible reason.
Someone may need to advise me on this one.

Hover = very important. This feature really helps me assure that my mouse
in the right position before clicking. Without the hover many times I did
not have the mouse in proper position which resulted going to the wrong
page.

Many thanks for the question and hope some of you will have an idea what I
see. I do have one big issue: Sign Language users who use American Sign
Language as their first language. There are quite a few deaf who cannot
read English writing well but can understand the content through sign
language.

Take care,
Randy Pope