SCULPT
Improve the accessibility of links in your content.
Why is this important?
Links in documents and on the web make it easy for an author to show their audience another website or related document. They are incredibly useful, and they work best when they’re written in a descriptive way.
Descriptive links benefit everyone, though they can be specifically useful for users of assistive technology such as screen readers due to the way those users can access links in a document or webpage.
Sometimes a screen reader user might choose to see all the links in a page together in a list of link titles. This makes it faster and easier for them to navigate to the link that they want to access, but it also removes any context that the original author had added around the link, this is why it’s better to include the context in the link itself.
Descriptive links benefit everyone, though they can be specifically useful for users of assistive technology.
What should I avoid?
Avoid including repeated link names in your documents, things like ‘click here’ or ‘read more’ sometimes make sense in the context of your paragraph, but a list of multiple ‘click here’ links make it very difficult for a user to know what the link is for.
Likewise, including the full web URL in a link can prove frustrating for some users of assistive technology, as the entire URL will be read aloud, some of them are very long and include meaningless strings of letters and numbers.
How do I do it?
Try and include the name of the destination in the actual link. For example if you were linking to this website you might include the whole title as the title of the link:
‘SCULPT – advice for accessible learning content’
If you’re providing a link to download a file, you could consider including the file type and even the file size after the file title to signal extra information to the user that they might find useful:
For example, naming a link: ‘Downloadable accessibility cheat sheet (PDF 1.2mb)’, provides useful contextual information about what will happen when you click the link, and also that the file that will be be downloaded is of 1.2mb in size.
This can be useful for instance if a user is on a train, or somewhere with patchy signal, or somewhere where they have low download speeds – It might mean they skip downloading that file until they find somewhere with a more reliable connection. All of this adds up to a user who is less frustrated and therefore having a better experience with your content that they might have done otherwise.
This guide explains how to create meaningful links in Microsoft Word is well thought out and you may find it useful.