Usability and accessibility experts urge designers to keep links underlined for two critical
reasons. First, underlined text is an established visual cue for a hyperlink on the Web; second,
links without underlines??”differentiated only by color??”can be virtually impossible
for color blind readers to differentiate, as in the preceding example.
The recommendation goes beyond hyperlinks, however. Avoid using only color to convey
any type of critical information. An icon that only changes color (like a circle going from
red to green) will have no significance to a visually impaired user who cannot identify the
change. Contrasting icon styles are shown in Figure 3-3.
Figure 3-3. In this fictional e-commerce book site, the design on the left uses icons whose
designs are indistinguishable to those with certain types of color blindness. By contrast,
the design on the right uses icons that express their meaning through both color and
imagery, leaving no doubt to their meaning.
Supplemental navigation
Traditional navigation menus can sometimes be unsuitable for those with disabilities.
While designers and developers should strive to use simple, semantic HTML markup for
drafting a site??™s navigation, some sites still rely on Flash, server-side imagemaps, and other
inaccessible mediums for menu systems.
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