Designing for Colour-Blindness

As always, I’ve been tinkering with the site over the last few weeks. One of the adjustments I made was to remove the underlines from links, which I felt made it looked lovely and clean. Yesterday, I asked my husband to check out a couple of links I’d included in a recent post I’d written. After several minutes reading, he asked “What links?” I looked at him in confusion. “The ones in the footnotes obviously.” I replied. “There aren’t any links in the footnotes” he retorted. And then it hit me. I'd forgotten my husband has deuteranomoly, one of several forms of colour-blindness. Those underlines I’d removed were the only way links had been visible to him. Now they were almost the same colour as the body text. This simulator enabled me to see what my husband does (or close to). My links, it turns out, are very difficult to see, especially in dark mode. Original on left, simulation on right - try switching between light/dark modes. I felt a bit gutted as the options available to me were…