Improving user experience with links, notifications, and Webmentions boffosocko.com
@c Chris, a warning. This sounds like one of the oldest black hat SEO tricks probably from pre-CSS days: coloring your links the same as your background. This was used back when people started selling links for link popularity purposes to effect the search engines and the search engines were cracking down. Maybe I'm reading it wrong but this sounds like a variant of that.
It's so old I'm not sure anyone remembers it, even Google, but if they do, it could incur a penalty because search engines can't interprit your good intent.
@smokey Thanks. I'd tried it on a handful of browsers both desktop and mobile and hadn't seen any issues. I didn't try mobile Safari however. I'll see if I can test it.
@bradenslen I also vaguely remember that, though I didn't pay much attention to SEO at the time. Even now I don't care that much about SEO for my personal site. For the moment I'll let go of worrying about it, though it's something I'll keep in the back of my mind.
The tough part is that the way I'm doing it in CSS, it only works when viewing on my website as other sites, readers, and even browsers (depending on settings) will use different CSS and displays. So it won't necessarily benefit everyone. I also spent a few minutes thinking about how it might affect accessibility, but I think that most screen readers will still see them as links and present them as such, so hopefully there are no problems there.
@c @bradenslen This doesn't effect screen readers, but it does effect people who are low-vision who don't use a screen reader, and possibly color blind people as well.