Why descriptive text on links is important for accessibility

One of the key principles of digital accessibility is that web designers and developers should try to make the experience the same for people who use assistive technology as for those who don’t.

One of the easiest ways to do this is to think about your links. As a sighted user, it’s usually easy to spot links and to instantly understand where they’re taking you. So there might be some text that says “We are the best widget supplier in the world” followed by a “Read More” link.

But an assistive technology reader may not want to read through every single word on the page, they may just want to skip straight to the link that takes them to where they want to go. To do this, they would skip from one link to the next until they find the relevant one.

Handily, most screen readers will provider a written list of links so that sighted users can see what the screen reader user will here, and believe me, it’s quite astonishing!

Below is a screenshot of an example list of links produced by the NVDA screen reader. I won’t name the site for obvious reasons, but you can see instantly that the lack of link text or wrong link text makes it almost impossible for the screen reader user to navigate the site.

And it’s such an easy fix! All you have to do is either use descriptive text (instead of just ‘read more’ say ‘find out more about our widgets’), or add alt text to links which are clickable images rather than words.