Accessibility and Hyperlinks
Transcription:
Hello, I’m James, today I’ll be talking about making your web content more accessible. In the excitement of creating and sharing content, we don’t always stop and think about how accessible that content is, especially for those in our audience who experience the web differently due to disability.
Many people with visual impairment or reading difficulties rely on screen readers to help them when reading stuff online. Today I’m going to look at hyperlinks, good practice for hyperlinks and some examples of bad hyperlinks and what we can do to make them more accessible
So here is the first example of a bad link. When hurrying to get a post out, it is very easy to simply copy and paste a URL link like the one here. Its not the friendliest link for anyone reading it, but it is even worse when using a screen reader, here is what it says:
Screen reader reads out entire URL
Pretty awful right? It is always a good idea to hide the URL in the HTML and instead have descriptive text letting people know where the link takes them.
Here is another example of a bad set of links. Now just at face value it is not clear why this would be bad. Often, people using screen readers navigate through a page by jumping from link to link, think of it like skim reading. If I were to navigate through these links it would sound like:
Screen reader reads out links as: ‘Visited link, click here’
Also not very helpful.
So what makes a good link?
A good link uses descriptive text rather than a URL or a ‘Click Here.’
The descriptive text is concise and describes exactly where the link goes. So don’t make it too long either
Ensure that your link makes sense out of context. If i had to just read this text right here, would I know exactly where the link goes?.
You don’t need to include the words ‘Link’ or ‘click’ in your description,
So remember, keep your links clear and descriptive and keep your media inclusive!