Low text contrast and no visual cues for links within body text in admin UI

[Thibaud Colas]

The Django admin’s light theme uses a light blue for links within text, with no other distinction of what is a link. This is problematic for two reasons:

• The current shade of blue, #447e9b, doesn’t have enough contrast against the white body background.
• For people with color blindness, there is no visual cue that a link is a link.

For those reasons, I would recommend:

• Changing the link color of --link-fg. My recommendation would be to use an ever-so-slightly darker #437c98 (1% less lightness in HSL representation)

- Introduce an underline for all links within body text, so they can be identified unambiguously.

[William Claassen]

A pull request has been added: ​PR. This includes:

• Changing the default colour to a slightly darkened in light mode (-1% lightness in HSL colour space) as requested
• Adding underline on hover for all default links (add/create links, breadcrumbs...) to make links easier to identify

[Mariusz Felisiak]

The new color have enough contrast when the background is white. Unfortunately --link-fg is also used with yellow (#ffffcc) and gray backgrounds (#f8f8f8). We should make it even darker to meet AA standards, e.g. #417893.

[Mariusz Felisiak]

​PR

[Mariusz Felisiak <felisiak.mariusz@…>]

In 1d0fa848:

Fixed #34038 -- Improved color contrast for links in admin.

[Mariusz Felisiak]

Reopen per Thibaud's comment. We need an underline and a better contrast.

[yushan]

​PR

[Natalia Bidart]

Pasting ​the latest comment from the linked PR to re-puporse this ticket for providing admin link underlines:

We had a good chat about this at our latest @django/accessibility meeting.
We agreed that for now, we should just fix the colours and not add the underline.
We should still do the underline part, but as a new ticket, because:
 * The changes can easily be done separately.
 * Because of the difficulty in deciding what should and shouldn't be underlined, it's better to get the less contentious change out first.

[Dylan Patrick Go]

​PR

[Mariusz Felisiak]

Thibaud, I don't see any contrast issues with the new color: #417893, so closing as fixed.