Make links visually distinguishable from body text - #405
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typography.css set `a { color: black }` globally, which is also the body
text colour, so links carried no colour affordance. footer.css stripped
text-decoration from every footer descendant, removing the underline too,
leaving footer links with no distinguishing cue at all.
Use --misc-neutral for links. It is the only existing token clearing both
relevant thresholds: 4.90:1 against white (WCAG AA for text) and 4.11:1
against --default-body (WCAG 1.4.1, 3:1 where colour separates a link from
surrounding text). --primary-p400 gives 8.06:1 on white but only 2.50:1
against body text; --primary is the reverse.
In the footer, keep #fff for contrast on the dark background and restore
the underline, since colour cannot do the work there.
Components that need their own treatment (.header-size a, .header-button,
buttons.css) already set colour explicitly and are unaffected; verified in
a browser that header links still compute to rgb(7,7,7).
Fixes #399
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01YBSvPwEk6sH1rhGmjPmsFq
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Fixes #399.
Two rules between them removed every visual cue that something is a link:
assets/style/base/typography.css:59—a { color: black }, andbodyis--default-body(#070707). Links were effectively the same colour as the text around them.assets/style/sections/footer.css:16-19—footer * { color: #fff; text-decoration: none }stripped the underline from every footer link, so footer links had neither colour nor underline.Choosing the colour
I picked
--misc-neutral(#007a9f) after checking the existing tokens against both thresholds that apply here — contrast against the background (WCAG AA, 4.5:1) and contrast against surrounding body text (WCAG 1.4.1, 3:1, which applies when colour is what separates a link from its text):--primary-p400--primary--primary-p500--primary-p200--misc-neutralMy first attempt used
--primary-p400, which looks like the obvious brand choice and has excellent contrast on white — but only 2.50:1 against body text, so it would have traded one indistinguishability problem for a subtler one.In the footer the background is #121212, so white has to stay for contrast (18.73:1) and the underline does the work instead.
Verified
Rendered the real header, a body paragraph, and the real footer against the actual stylesheets in headless Chromium:
Header links are unaffected because
.header-size asets--misc-darkexplicitly; the same is true of.header-buttonand everything inbuttons.css. The change reaches links in body content, which is the intent.Worth a human eye
This is a small diff with site-wide visual reach, and I can't build the full site locally to check it across page types. Body-content links on generated package landing pages in particular are worth a look before merging — that's ~7,600 pages inheriting the base rule with their own legacy CSS alongside it.
If the project would rather keep links black, the alternative that still satisfies #399 is to give body links a permanent underline and leave the colour alone. That's a one-line change in the same place; say the word and I'll swap it.
🤖 Generated with Claude Code
https://claude.ai/code/session_01YBSvPwEk6sH1rhGmjPmsFq