Links aren't usually unaccompanied. They are usually placed in a context of a sentence or an entire paragraph. Even if the screen reader reads a raw URL as lite

Links aren't usually unaccompanied. They are usually placed in a context of a sentence or an entire paragraph. Even if the screen reader reads a raw URL as literally the word "link", it's still reasonable. You can even do something like HN does with the URLs next to article titles, list just the domain - or domain.com/username for sites like medium or github, just like HN started doing recently.