Link Purpose

Requirements

Sometimes, assistive technology users will look at a list of links or headings from a web page. VoiceOver allows users to do this from the “rotor” while browsing the web.

2.4.4 Link Purpose (In Context) (level A):
2.4.9 Link Purpose (Link Only) (level AAA):

By ensuring the text is descriptive and unique, we enable users to quickly find what they are looking for. If every link were to, for example, consist of the words “click here”, it would be difficult to identify which one points to which destination.

This is especially apparent on the front page, where some of the links have the instance name (often a year number) as the label.

Partial screenshot showing the rotor listing front page links

Examples

Course Results

The course results page contains similar text for every exercise, for example:

1/10

in context, it’s visible that this is in the “Submissions” column, but when viewing the list of links, these are somewhat meaningless.

As covered in the page “Links and Buttons”, these don’t perform the action of a “link”, (they open a drop-down menu), so they needn’t be visible on the list of links at all.

There is a GitHub issue (597)