Meaningful Links

Meaningful links is one of the success criteria that we often see violated, and especially if you have things like read more links, they can often be on the verge of not being descriptive enough, meaningful enough for that link.

So there are two success criteria. The first one is 2.4.4 link purpose and context, which basically aims at making sure that if you have a link inside of a paragraph, if you read the whole paragraph and the link, it makes sense where that link goes.

And then there is 2.4.9, which is link purpose link only.

And that would be if you are removing the paragraph around the link.

For example, as a screen reader user, you have a list of links.

You still know where that link goes exactly.

Yeah, and that's a AAA success criteria.

So the important thing is in the context that you know what's going on. And the thing that you usually want to do is you want to make your links as descriptable as possible. So this is the good and bad example.

So on the left side you have for more information on device independence, click here.

And the click here is the link text.

And yeah, in context, this still makes sense.

You know where this is going.

But if you have it out of context, then you have read more about device independence and you link about device independence.

And that works for everyone.

And I would highly encourage you to go the more descriptive link route.

Not only has it accessibility and usability benefits, it's also better for like search engine stuff, I think.

And it is just it makes everyone's life so much easier.

So whenever you can get away from like linking read more or click here or something like that, it's always a win for everybody.