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Comment by ehnto | Hacker News Reader

I had no idea the article was littered with links, as the colour difference is too small to see for me and my monitor. They look like the same colour to me. If Substack feels a different colour for links is too distracting or tacky, maybe they could consider a little icon denoting a link. But it's not very good web etiquette to hide links like that.

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On the web, links are underlined by default, a clear, non-color way to visually convey they're links. It has become way too common for sites to remove that styling, maybe showing the underline when the cursor is hovered (useless on mobile devices without a cursor); this one doesn't even show the styling on :focus to make the visible on keyboard navigation.

The underline is an affordance, an indicator that it's special. The problem with removing it is there is no way to see it's a link without affirmatively taking an action over the text. Plus, on touch screens, there is no hovering.

Underlining is a common way to indicate links. However, Substack allows the author to decide whether to make links bright blue or merely underlined.

How would people with screenreaders or limited central vision use this site?

While most screen reader users have some vision, screen reader software is mostly not affected by styling changes so they will still say "link" when there is one.

People with various kinds of low vision (or color blindness) who do not use a screen reader but use text enlargement, screen zooming, etc. would have a particularly hard time differentiating the links from the surrounding text.

The links are utterly invisible on a (monochrome) e-ink device.

Who's responsible for the styling, the author or Substack itself?

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