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Style of links in posts

tazz

Well-Known Member
V.I.P Member
Links in posts are just slightly lighter in shade than the rest of the text. Hardly noticeable at all. I often miss them. My suggestion would be to make them a color that contrasts with the text, or display them with an underline. This would also be best practice for accessible websites.
 
I am going to post a link to a game and see how that looks to me.

======================================================================
OK, that is in a gray tone.

One thing I do sometimes to make links more obvious, particularly in Chat,
is to use the word "Link" and put a "<" to point to it.

Like this:

Link > Word Association Game
 
Links in posts are just slightly lighter in shade than the rest of the text. Hardly noticeable at all. I often miss them. My suggestion would be to make them a color that contrasts with the text, or display them with an underline. This would also be best practice for accessible websites.

I always place links in bold and make them a different color to make them more noticeable. You can just overline them and click on the B, then the three dots, the painting pallette and from there pick a color.
 
The colors show up while I'm doing the process, but
not after I've actually clicked "Post reply."

1679321208174.png


What am I doing wrong?
How am I managing to fail at this?
 
I can't get them to post in colors from my Windows 10 PC
 
 
I'm running into the same issue in Linux. At the staging sequence I can change the text color. But when it's posted it comes out grey.

www.autismforums.com

Whoa. When I took away the bold face and saved it, the link went colored as shown above.

(In Firefox I always default to overriding a website's formatting where possible.)
 
Last edited:
I'm curious to see the answer to this myself. As for the original poster's question, @tazz you can override the website's settings in your browser. I have only used Firefox for many years now, there you'll find it under the General settings and Colour. I think all browsers have these options.

screen06.jpg
 
@Outdated, does my posted link above show up as a bluish-grey color?

Just wanted to make sure that what I see is what everyone else may see.

Odd though if it takes reformatting from bold to regular just to validate a colored link. That can't be right....or can it?
 
I think I'll stick with what I've been doing.

Using the word "Link" and a carat to point toward the link.
 
Seems like a mere hack to alter the formatting and then color the link. Not kosher to me, anyways.

But then I tend to have little issues with grey links on a very dark grey background using "Dark Reader". Easier for me to distinguish as opposed to a white background.

Though if a user has their contrast set too high or too low in either their monitor or OS, I can see how it might be an issue for some.
 
@tazz, just to validate my understanding you're referring to when there are links in text. I think this is a very valid point. For example linking to Google

From my perspective, we get reports from users flagging spam that has managed to be posted, the links in the text can be quite difficult to differentiate from the rest of the text. I imagine this would be similar in more day to day use.

I have added an underline to links, which should make them obvious going forwards,
 
I see two styles of links.

First style

This is the style I posted about, which looks like body text, like this, where the second line is a link and looks almost identical to the first line which is not a link:

Screenshot 2023-03-20 at 16.59.16.png


Another example, the first two words "Parallel (2018)" are a link and it's super easy to miss this because it's part of a sentence:

Screenshot 2023-03-20 at 16.59.44.png


Second style

Then there's this style of link, which is very clear and obvious:

Screenshot 2023-03-20 at 17.00.27.png


I do not know what controls which style of link ends up in the post. Is it that a link that goes somewhere within autismforums.com is the second style and links to web pages on other sites are the less obvious first style?

Overriding a website's styles with browser settings has pros and cons. It sounds good because the user has control over how the links appear. But because the user doesn't have control over things like the web page's background color, it still doesn't ensure that a link has a high contrast to the background. Also, not all browsers have these settings (I always use chrome and apparently there are some settings but you need to know CSS and it's an advanced feature).

The WEBAIM initiative, and the WCAG standards, have detailed minimum standards for accessible links, and the responsibility is on the designer/owner of the website, not the user: WebAIM: Links and Hypertext - Link Text and Appearance
 

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