> Accessibility and usability are two very different things and should not be conflated.

Nope. They are the same. It's a taxonomy of convenience.

I do not care what W3C says about this.

Example: If you have something with say clean typefaces it may be considered more usable unless the person has low vision or dyslexia then it's accessibility. The labels are easily swappable and there's tons of learning and attention disabilities people have (most people are probably not cognitively perfect).

What if you add an elevator to a building with a bunch of stairs. That's accessibility for the handicapped but also usability for others and thus we've swapped in the opposite direction.

You can take everything labeled usability and relabel it accessibility with a slightly different narrative and the reverse is true also.

The distinction therefore, in this context, is illusory. It's not an actual material difference here, just a fiction.

In scholarly research sure it's not the same. But in the material world without the clinical precision of scholarship, they are in practice always intertwined.

And this is fine, I don't care. A taxonomy of convenience is still a convenient taxonomy. Let's not kid ourselves however...

If you dont care about the standards, which governments use to define how accessibility works and who it applies to for legal purposes, then you essentially want to make up your own rules, policies, and ideas. Which is fine, mostly. However, it doesn't really give you solid ground to stand on when making an argument about other people's work. The fact is that according to the recognized "experts" on the subject (I'm using recognized here because again, governments use these standards and they have legal merit) there is nothing wrong with these links. There is, however, something wrong with conflating accessibility and usability. They are different. One applies to protected classes. The other has to do with everyone, but is in no way protected. There are legal ramifications to one. With the other, you are maybe a jerk for doing things against usability, but if it is equally bad for everyone, it often is not an accessibility issue. Accessibility is about leveling a palying field, usability is an opinion based thing regarding how a random person might interact with a website and usually relates to design decisions, not programatic experiences.

That's not the topic here.

It was someone deciding they don't have to listen or act about something because they chose to label it usability.

That's actual mechanics of what went down. It's just a game here. A retreat to abstractions doesn't change that.

I'm not here to scold people but I also don't like nonsense

> Example: If you have something with say clean typefaces it may be considered more usable unless the person has low vision or dyslexia then it's accessibility. The labels are easily swappable and there's tons of learning and attention disabilities people have (most people are probably not cognitively perfect).

If it's equally a problem for everyone then it's not an accessibility problem.

(And don't think for a second that any design avoids causing problems.)

The link styling is inconsistent with basically every other web page; underlines haven't been "everywhere" since the late 1990s (for better or worse), but distinguishing links has usually been done via the use of color, maybe some other border effect.

The style chosen by this particular web page comes across not as hyperlinks, but as a weird choice to randomly remove words and phrases from the main sentence matter, rendering them more difficult to read and comprehend, and worse, leaving the reader unaware this this choice actually denoted a link.

Using color alone to distinguish links is explicitly an accessibility violation. Underlines are not a requirement. I certainly agree that the link system here is atypical. It just isnt an accessibility violation.