This time I want to talk a little about Suspicious Link Text. Monsido flags Suspicious links within the Accessibility section of the site report. In fact, suspicious links are considered to be a Level A requirement which means fixing them is a basic requirement for meeting Accessibility requirements.
What is a suspicious link? A suspicious link is an anchor (link) that contains text such as ‘click here’, ‘here’, ‘more’, and other generic words that do not describe the link. When site visitors who may be visually impaired or even blind open a page, many screen readers provide a list of links to the person that they can choose from so that they do not have to ‘listen’ to the entire page to identify all the links. When the link text is not descriptive, or worse, when all the links simply say ‘here’ or ‘click here’, this list of links becomes essentially useless. This puts the vision-impaired person at a disadvantage when trying to obtain information from your page. That is what makes this an accessibility issue. The following figure shows an example of such a page extracted from one of the OCPS web pages.
These five links all have the same link text, the word ‘HERE’ which gives the vision impaired person no clue as to what the link may be when they hear a list of available links from this page.
A better style option includes more descriptive text as part of the link text such as shown in the revised version of the same page.
Now when the site visitor hears a list of the links, they have a clear idea of what each link does. In fact, there might even be an argument for making the first link ‘Information on Valencia Dual Enrollment’ instead of just ‘Valencia Dual Enrollment’.
The key is to think like a blind or vision-impaired person who is listening to the page being read to them, the links being read to them, or the headers being read to them. Can you close your eyes and pretend you are only hearing this information without seeing it with your eyes? Do you still understand what information the page is providing? If not, you may want to make changes that will make more sense.
It is easy to fix the ‘Suspicious links’ in your Monsido accessibility reports. Just ask yourself if the link text clearly identifies what the link is.