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From: David Ashleydale
Date: May 18, 2012 3:49PM

Hi,

I love using WebAIM's Color Contrast
Checker<http://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/>;to ensure that
there is enough contrast between text and its background,
but I'm wondering if there's a similar mathematical formula for determining
whether there is enough difference in color between the text of a link and
its surrounding text in order for users to recognize the text as a link.
One great visual cue that helps with this is underlining the link (as in my
previous sentence), but what about when the visual design team doesn't want
underlined links?

At first I was tempted to just use the color contrast checker to compare
the color of the text of the link and the color of the surrounding text,
but that doesn't seem exactly right. Black text is fine against a white
background and bright blue text (0000FF) for links is fine against a white
background. I think it's also fairly clear that this difference in color
would be sufficient to tell links from regular text. But 0000FF and black
do not provide enough contrast against each other.

I'm just wondering if there's some other mathematical rule of thumb for
this.

Thanks!
David Ashleydale