Very good article. WCAG 2.0 has specific guidance for non-underlined links. Because color is the only mechanism used to identify the link, the guidelines require that the link have a 3:1 contrast difference from the surrounding non-link text, and that the link become underlined (or have some other non-color designator) on both mouse hover and keyboard focus.
WAVE currently only checks contrast issues between foreground text and background. The example you use clearly passes (the maroon text has sufficient contrast to the background). But this does make me think that we could add logic to test the 3:1 text to text contrast ratio for non-underlined links, as well as flag lack of hover/focus styles. Your example is only around 1.9:1 (maroon text to black text).
Jared Smith
Very good article. WCAG 2.0 has specific guidance for non-underlined links. Because color is the only mechanism used to identify the link, the guidelines require that the link have a 3:1 contrast difference from the surrounding non-link text, and that the link become underlined (or have some other non-color designator) on both mouse hover and keyboard focus.
WAVE currently only checks contrast issues between foreground text and background. The example you use clearly passes (the maroon text has sufficient contrast to the background). But this does make me think that we could add logic to test the 3:1 text to text contrast ratio for non-underlined links, as well as flag lack of hover/focus styles. Your example is only around 1.9:1 (maroon text to black text).