Descriptive link text: what to get right first

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. If you only fix one thing about descriptive link text this quarter, make it the first item below.

Most of it is correctness rather than charity: use the right element and much of it happens automatically. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

Start here

Links are often read out of context. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

Then this

"Read more" tells nobody anything. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Eventually

Say where the link goes. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

In practice

Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. Three things worth confirming about descriptive link text before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Say where the link goes — 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.