Though I don't maintain a blog at WordPress.com, I do have an account there for testing its accessibility. One area where it's always failed pretty badly is the color schemes of its themes.
Many of the WordPress.com themes don't underline links within posts or even make them bold. Color combinations like green links with either black text or dark grey text, dark blue links with dark grey text, red links with black text, and light orange links with dark red text are just a few of the combinations in various themes that may cause problems even for people with "normal" color vision - let alone people with red-green color blindness or older folks who may be finding it more difficult to perceive differences between colors.
DePo Masthead, the new magazine-style theme released a couple of weeks ago, isn't much of an improvement in that regard. Is it gorgeous? Sure. I'm tempted to print it out and put it up as wallpaper. But is it accessible and user-friendly? No. Red and black combined are never a good choice without also designating links with some kind of underlining or bold... unless you know you don't have any readers who are among the 8% of the American male population with some color blindness.
I guess many designers are starting to feel that underlining links in text makes their design less elegant. A blog I very much enjoy, EcoWorldly, suffers from this affliction. (Disclosure: I blog for another site owned by the same company.) EcoWorldly's dark blue links in black text just aren't easy to see even for a 34 year old woman with eyesight that corrects to 20/20.
I don't have a quarrel with non-underlined links in navigation, since most web users - even newer ones who are still fumbling around with this whole "internet" thing - can probably figure out that something that looks like a menu might be clickable. DePo Masthead seems to be relying on this familiarity when it attempts to differentiate the Category link on each post from the surrounding text by making it dark grey instead of light grey.
Links in posts, though, are presumably included because you want your readers to see them and click on them. DePo Masthead's red and black combo isn't a safe one for making sure that all visitors can easily distinguish text from links.
If you can be sure that your audience doesn't include anyone who is color blind, new to the web, older, or has cognitive disabilities, then do as you will. But if you can't rule out those populations and you care about whether your readers can use your blog without squinting or having to think really, really hard, then you may want to think twice about jumping on this web design trend. As far as I know, WordPress.com users don't have the option of changing their link colors or underlining without paying for an upgrade, so I wish WordPress would ensure that the themes they provide these users contribute to a better web experience for everyone.
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