Re: Hyperlinks in PDF -- should they be visible or not?

[voxwoman <voxwoman -at- gmail -dot- com>]

In an electronic document, hyperlinks should be visible - and in companies
that cared about accessability that I used to work for, there had to be 2
degrees of difference (i.e. color plus underline) between non-hyperlinked
text and hyperlinked text. Reading an electronic document is not supposed to
be a game where the reader has to mouse over the entire page to find hot
links.

If you are really concerned about the documents looking "right" when
printed, the company should supply hardcopy. Other than that, you have no
control over what the docs are going to look like, since you're not printing
them. You can always recommend that when they print the PDF the user can
select "Print colors as black" - but there is no guarantee that they will do
this.

-Wendy

On Tue, Jan 19, 2010 at 6:44 AM, Viv Crawford <viv_crawford -at- hotmail -dot- com>wrote:

>
> Hello
>
> For each product release we create an online help and a bunch of pdf
> manuals. These are always referred to as print manuals, but in fact are
> distributed electronically.
>
>
>
> At the minute, all the hyperlinks and cross references in them are in plain
> black text so as to look 'right' if printed. The reader's only clue to the
> presence of a hyperlink would be the pdf 'hand' icon if they happened to
> hover (and the context of course).
>
>
>
> I'm inclined to think that it's more useful to have a visible hyperlink as
> users are more likely to read the manuals on screen -- and if they are
> reading a hard-copy version, they've printed it themselves, so in theory
> shouldn't mind that there are visible hyperlinks.
>
>
>
> Should I change them to be visible? How do others handle this?
>
> TIA
>
> Viv
>
>
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