Link treatment
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Rule · bucket: judgment · severity: note · detector: none · since: v0.1.0
Section: Things to avoid
Group: Colour and contrast

Forbidden:
  Dropping the underline but keeping the colour, in body text. That is the one combination that fails colour-blind users while looking fine to everyone else.

Instead:
  Keep the underline. Colour is the part you may drop — an underlined link without colour still reads as a link to everyone; a coloured link without an underline reads as a link only to people who can see the colour.

The default for a link **inside running text** is colour **and** underline. Colour-blind users cannot separate a coloured link from surrounding prose; the underline is what makes it a link for them.

Two legitimate departures, and they are not the same:

| Case | Treatment | Why |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Body text link | Colour + underline | Default. Never drop both. |
| Already-obviously-interactive component — nav item, tab, card, button-styled link | Neither required | Position, container and grouping already signal it. Adding link styling clutters without informing. |
| Secondary link that colour + underline would over-weight | **Underline, no colour** | Keeps the affordance while restoring hierarchy — a supporting link should not compete with the primary action beside it. |