Three myths about descriptive link text

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. A few things about descriptive link text that get repeated more often than they get checked.

Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

“It only matters for big sites”

Links are often read out of context. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

“We can deal with it after launch”

Sometimes true, usually expensive. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions.

“Our platform handles it”

Say where the link goes. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

How to tell if yours is fine

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
• 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

None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.