Why descriptive link text matters more than it looks

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. Descriptive link text is easy to treat as a detail, and that is exactly why it is worth a few minutes of attention.

The cost of retrofitting accessibility is several times the cost of building it in. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

The reason this keeps coming up

Links are often read out of context. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

"Read more" tells nobody anything. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

Common failure modes

Say where the link goes. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

In practice

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
• 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

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.