A short guide to descriptive link text

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. Everything we would tell a client about descriptive link text in the time it takes to drink a coffee.

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.

The reason this keeps coming up

Links are often read out of context. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Where to start

"Read more" tells nobody anything. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

Common failure modes

Say where the link goes. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

The short version

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
• 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

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.