The real cost of ignoring descriptive link text
The version of this that works is simpler than the version most people imagine. Nobody bills you for neglecting descriptive link text. The cost shows up somewhere else.
The cost of retrofitting accessibility is several times the cost of building it in. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.
Where the cost lands
- Time spent on work that should not have been necessary
- Enquiries that quietly never arrive
- Links are often read out of context
- Rework, once the problem is finally visible
"Read more" tells nobody anything. 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.
What to do next
Say where the link goes. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.
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
- 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
If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.