When descriptive link text is worth the effort

The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. Descriptive link text is not free, and pretending otherwise leads to bad decisions.

Most of it is correctness rather than charity: use the right element and much of it happens automatically. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

When it is worth it

Links are often read out of context. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

When it is not

If nothing downstream depends on it and nobody is complaining, it can wait. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions.

How to decide

Say where the link goes. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

What this looks like day to day

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
• 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

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