Link text
This one’s pretty simple actually, so there’s not much to say about good practice with link text. However, I do keep seeing it being done wrong, so here’s an outline of the key things to consider.
The first thing to remember is that the link text should “identify the target of each link”. In other words, don’t use text like “click here”. Apart from the implication that the user must use a mouse, imagine what a screen reader user would have read out to them on tabbing from link to link and having the link text of each one read out!
The other aspect to this is that if your link text is misleading about the information available at the other end of the link, you could well waste people’s time. Consider how you feel when you follow a search result, only to find that the page you ended up on has no useful information.
My theory (just my theory - I’d be interested to hear other opinions) on the use of “click here” as link text is that it originally came about in the early days of the internet, when users were somewhat new to it all, and some of the people building websites tried to help users out by telling them where to click. Of course, the fact that links look / behave like links should is enough. Now we just need to get rid of some rather ingrained bad practice!
There’s also a slight catch which the advice on the W3C website doesn’t account for.
The advice given is that the title attribute should be used to help provide additional information about the target of different links, in particular where they share the same link text. This would be most useful for users of screen readers, but what is not so widely known, it seems, is that screen readers do not by default read out the title attribute.
Since the majority of screen reader users do not customise the settings of their readers (there are a couple of reasons for this, and I’ll be writing a post on screen readers in the near future), the title attribute is therefore of more limited use than it would first seem.
So, to summarise:
- Make sure the link text gives your users a good idea of where they’ll end up.
- Don’t use text like “click here”.
- Make use of the title attribute where appropriate, but remember that not everyone will get this information.