Re: Click here and other bad link texts

On Sun, 9 Feb 2003, Jesper Tverskov wrote:

> Link text like "Click here" is bad because it does not make sense in
> screen readers (WCAG 13.1). But I have seen some websites using
> meaningful title attributes in such cases, and I am wondering if that
> could make such link text acceptable or not?

No, because even when the title attributes work, they remove just part of
the problems. Actually, when you listen to a page in sequential mode,
"Click here" just sounds naive without really disturbing, since the link
has already been identified in the preceding context. In links reading
mode, it would depend on whether the screen reader gives the user access
to the title attribute in addition to the link text. The same applies to
using a list of all links on a page, or a printed copy of the page (where
the title text could be shown e.g. as a footnote).

Generally, it would be possible to browsers and other user agents to use
title attributes for anything that link text might be used for. But it
would be unnatural and distracting to use title attributes as _primary_
text. Hence it is not acceptable to put the primary information there,
using the link text for some device dependent instruction.

I'd like to refer to a discussion on "Click here" in the list last August,
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ig/2002JulSep/thread.html#434
and to my page that I wrote to summarize some points:
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www/click.html

-- 
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Monday, 10 February 2003 01:09:35 UTC