Before you invest in descriptive link text

We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. Before you spend anything on descriptive link text, it is worth confirming a few things are already true.

Most of it is correctness rather than charity: use the right element and much of it happens automatically. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

Prerequisites

• You can describe the outcome you want in one sentence
• Someone owns it after the work is done
• Links are often read out of context
• You have a way to tell whether it worked

Where it usually goes wrong

"Read more" tells nobody anything. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

Say where the link goes. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

What this looks like day to day

The cost of retrofitting accessibility is several times the cost of building it in. Three things worth confirming about descriptive link text before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Links are often read out of context — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.