Link purpose examples

Hello,

Would you please edit or clarify two of the examples for stating link purpose? I'm referring to this page: https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/link-purpose-in-context.html. I found this page while assisting a college faculty member who was editing their Canvas course, so thank you for creating it!

There are two examples that I have questions about:

  *   A list of book titles

A list of books is available in three formats: HTML, PDF, and mp3 (a recording of a person reading the book). To avoid hearing the title of each book three times (once for each format), the first link for each book is the title of the book, the second link says "PDF" and the third says, "mp3."

  *   News article summaries

A Web page contains a collection of news articles. The main page lists the first few sentences of each article, followed by a "Read more" link. A screen reader command to read the current paragraph provides the context to interpret the purpose of the link.

For the list of books, I think the title should still be in the link name, such as after the format type. Otherwise, a screen reader user using a links list might get confused about which format is referring to which book. Placing the format type first would allow the user to quickly hear the type and then move to the next link without having to listen to the whole title, but they could still confirm they were on the correct title if they listened to it.

For the news articles, I think it would be confusing to hear in the links list, "read more", "read more" without hearing which article the "read more" related to. As a sighted user, I might be biased about what a blind user might need, and maybe not everyone uses a links list in this manner, but I'm basing my understanding on working with a blind college student.

Could I suggest editing the following examples?

  *   A list of book titles

A list of books available in three formats: HTML, PDF, and mp3 (a recording of a person reading the book). Help differentiate between the formats by naming each link with the format before the title of the book, such as "(HTML) [Book Title]", "(PDF) [Book Title]" and "(mp3) [Book Title]".

  *   News article summaries

A Web page contains a collection of news articles. The main page lists the first few sentences of each article, followed by a "Read more" link. Include the article title after "read more" in the link name to help differentiate links in a screen reader links list, such as "Read more about [Title of Article]".

My suggestions will probably require discussion and user testing to determine if they are actually useful for most people. I really appreciate your work on this topic and on accessibility overall. Thank you!

John Cavano, OTR/L, ATP
Associate Professor / Assistive Technology
San Joaquin Delta College
john.cavano@deltacollege.edu
Google Voice: (209) 213-2936
Desktop Phone: (209) 954-5151 ext 6106