How to get descriptive link text right
There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. The short answer to descriptive link text is that it is mostly a sequence of small decisions, not one big one.
Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.
What is actually at stake
Links are often read out of context. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.
The steps
- Establish what you have today before changing anything
- "Read more" tells nobody anything
- Say where the link goes
- Write down the decision so the next person does not re-litigate it
Say where the link goes. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.
What to do next
What this looks like day to day
Most of it is correctness rather than charity: use the right element and much of it happens automatically. Three things worth confirming about descriptive link text before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- "Read more" tells nobody anything — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.