Re: SC 2.4.5, meaningful link text

Jason White wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 02, 2006 at 12:45:41PM -0600, Gregg Vanderheiden wrote:
>>Also - the question is how helpful.  And why couldn't AT be programmed to
>>allow users to get information around a link with a simple keystroke for
>>those cases where the link all by itself did not give them enough
>>information.
> 
> Do GUI screen readers make this hard? Under all of the Unix text browsers I
> use, and with both braille and speech assistive technologies it's trivial to
> read the line containing the link, the lines before and after, etc. As a
> result, this has never struck me as a concern. At most it's a couple of
> seconds of extra work to read the context. I tend to read the text of
> unfamiliar pages anyway, rather than just reading links, so for my usage
> pattern the problem rarely arises. With familiar pages I use the "text search"
> function of whichever user agent I'm running to get straight to the desired
> point without having to navigate to it.
> 
> I suspect it's the kind of problem that affects some user agent/assistive
> technology combinations more than others, and some people more than others.

My understanding is that reading the text that surrounds a link in GUI 
screen readers is not at all difficult. It is true that when a user 
pulls up a list of links on a page, surrounding text would no longer be 
available, but I don't believe this is something we should be concerned 
with as this is a case of a UA feature that re-displays the content 
outside of its original context.

David, can you clarify where you recommend including this? I assume your 
proposed text (Provide meaningful link text, unless the link is part of 
an array of links to different versions (or views) of the same 
information.) is a technique, but it is phrased like a success 
criterion. If the former, would this be advisory or sufficient?

-Ben

Received on Wednesday, 4 January 2006 22:39:19 UTC