Make Links Make Sense Out of Context
Q: What’s the difference between these two ways of offering a web link to a user?
- To download our brochure: click here.
- You can download our brochure here.
A: The first one is harder for visually impaired people to use.
Screen-reader software often has a mode where the user can skim the page for clickable links, and these links need to make sense out of context. In this case, the first link would be read aloud as “click here,” while the second would be dictated as “download our brochure”—much more usable.
Let’s take another example from an index of blog posts. Compare the following links:
- Blog post story 1: Read more
- Blog post item 2: Read blog post item 2
In this example, recapping the title in the “read more” link gives additional context and prevents the screen reader from simply reading a list of “read more, read...
