The AccessibilityAccessibilityAccessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) Team shares accessibility expertise across the project to improve the accessibility of WordPress coreCoreCore is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. and resources.
Rule of thumb: a link text should describe the resource that it links to, even when the text is read out of context. The user must know what to expect.
Make the text stand on it’s own. Some assistive software scans a page for links and presents them to the user as a simple list. In these situations, all the links will be read out of context. So it is important the text used in a link is descriptive, meaningful.
Descriptive, meaningful link text in the Apple VoiceOver link list
It also makes your text better scannable for sighted users when the search the information they want to read.
If you use meaningless links text like this, sighted users have to read the whole sentence to understand what the click here means and screen reader users have to guess where the link to leading to. In both cases this will slow the user down, understanding your content.
Useless, non descriptive link text in the Apple VoiceOver link list
Also avoid fancy character combinations in your links such as:
ASCII art, example: \ō͡≡o˞̶
Emoticons, example: <3
Leetspeak, example: m8ts
Not every user or technology gets what that means.
Avoid writing links in all caps. It’s harder to read for people with dyslexia and some screen readers will think short words are abbreviations so spell the words out character by character. This also counts for text capitalized with CSS.
Avoid using complete URLs as link text. If you are explicitly referring to a web address, keep it short like for example: wordpress.org instead of https://www.wordpress.org
Incorrect (non descriptive) link texts: If you are interested in our work, click here to subscribe to our newsletter. You can download the manual of the espresso machine, or contact us for more info.
For linked images, the alt attribute (the alternative text) will be the link text.
It the alt attribute describes the image: the link text will be the description of the image, which is unlikely to clearly communicate the link purpose
If there is No alt attribute: the link text will be the image file name
If there is an Empty alt attribute: the link will have no link text and will be announced as “link”
So the proper way to use an image as link: give as alternative text the link destination. So, if the image links to a post about the handbook of the accessibility team, give the image as alternative text “Handbook of the accessibility team”.
