5 ms·

Use a screen reader. Tab through the links. All you hear is, "click here." That's not helpful. Build a search engine. What information does "click here" offer

Use a screen reader. Tab through the links. All you hear is, "click here." That's not helpful. Build a search engine. What information does "click here" offer your index? I agree with you that verbs don't seem all that problematic. Except when the verb is click and the object is here. I can stomach a link whose text is "Click Here to download Amaya," but if the link is literally just the two words, "click here," it is indistinguishable from others in many different contexts.

xanrah 1y ago
I'm sorry, should we design websites around SEO, or should search engines just use context properly?
- echelon 1y ago
  Search engines and websites are going to be subsumed by LLMs, so it's not like this argument matters anymore.
  - bigbuppo 1y ago
    The general consensus is that the dislike of AI is so strong, that a large chunk of the population will disregard something if they even think it is generated by AI. Also, the LLMs need a continuous feed of new, original material to ingest or they'll be all thumbs. While the long-running trend of SEO stuffing from low-value content farms has polluted search results for years now, Google didn't really care about fixing that problem because there's a perverse incentive to generate more ad revenue by making the first page results usesless. Who cares about doing the right thing? Daddy's got to get his quarterly numbers up. I should also note that those content farms were also early adopters of genAI as we know it today. Infinite growth isn't a thing. Every cancer eventually kills its host.
    - bee_rider 1y ago
      Are you sure that’s the general consensus about AI? HN has a very intense relationship with this stuff, because we have hardcore boosters and hardcore skeptics. Among people I meet offline the feelings seem a lot weaker in either direction.
      - bigbuppo 1y ago
        As best I can tell, your typical person here doesn't tend to hang out with normies, which definitely skews things.
    - echelon 1y ago
      > The general consensus is that the dislike of AI is so strong This is such an echo chamber. Most people love AI. It's one of the fastest growing types of content across all social media. The news media is telling us we hate it (eg. John Oliver, 404 Media), but this is not the mainstream consensus. Views and likes don't lie. "Normies" think this technology is magical. Some organs of the traditional news media are trying to skew their opinions.
      - cgriswald 1y ago
        I see constant comments on social media complaining something is AI sometimes even when it’s not. Those commenters are all viewing it but they aren’t choosing it. And “likes” absolutely lie because there isn’t a “dislike” option.
      - creata 1y ago
        > Views and likes don't lie. If you're saying you have relevant stats, then please, share the stats.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
rendaw 1y ago
At one point does accessibility decrease accessibility? I'm all for making improvements in the name of accessibility, but not so much about making things worse to support the least common denominator of screen readers. If people are going to need to change their behavior, wouldn't it be better to suggest some aria annotation instead?
- hombre_fatal 1y ago
  Aria tags are something you think might have more developer compliance than better anchor text? Most of us never wrote an aria attribute in our life. But I haven't used "click here" as anchor text in 20 years because it sucks for these reasons.
  - rovr138 1y ago
    I think the links just need to be longer vs a couple of words. We are used to small areas, but the problem is that you end up with 'click here', like in the example. But if you linked the whole text, it's basically the same thing as adding aria. IMO, most cases that I see using aria seem like a fix after the fact vs doing it the right way. There are use cases for it, but in the case of the example, making the whole sentence a link would be good. Regarding screen readers, you can have it read all links, which is why the 'click here' is an issue. So you want a balance. Change "for x, <a href=...>click here</a>" "<a href=...>for x, click here</a>"... ta-da? You need to optimize for people using accessibility tools, but also for the people looking at the site...
    - Izkata 1y ago
      > Regarding screen readers, you can have it read all links, which is why the 'click here' is an issue. So you want a balance. Change "for x, <a href=...>click here</a>" "<a href=...>for x, click here</a>"... ta-da? No, you want the verb to be whatever "x" does or is for, not the action taken to get there. The action taken to get there is the same for all links regardless of what they're for. So this is a bad example simply because we don't know what "x" is so we don't know what a better verb would be.
layer8 1y ago
There are techniques to solve that, however: https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Techniques/html/H33 https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Techniques/html/H33 https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Techniques/css/C7 https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Techniques/css/C7
- runarberg 1y ago
  I never understood why the visually hidden has not been incorporated into the CSS standard proper (something like display: visually-none). Instead the standard is effectively recommending authors use a hack to do what is a very common pattern.
  - layer8 1y ago
    It's a hack either way. Screen readers really should support the title attribute like they do for image links; or maybe HTML should have had an alt attribute for <a href> as well. When using a mouse pointer, you also want that information as a tooltip.
danillonunes 1y ago
The problem here is that the screen reader will just read the link text and not the contract around it. In this case, the correct examples proposed by W3C will read just as "Amaya”, which are almost as unhelpful.
- burningChrome 1y ago
  Even the WCAG level A success criteria clearly states: The purpose of each link can be determined from the link text alone or from the link text together with its programmatically determined link context, except where the purpose of the link would be ambiguous to users in general. https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/link-purpose-in-context.html https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/link-purpose-in-... Having a single word announced by the screen reader to me would fail this criteria.
  - danlitt 1y ago
    together with its programmatically determined link context really is the operative phrase in this quote. I would encourage you to actually read the examples on the page you link to - several of them announce just one or two words.
    - burningChrome 1y ago
      OP's comment addressed that: The problem here is that the screen reader will just read the link text and not the contract around it. I would encourage you to read OP's comment first?
      - danlitt 1y ago
        I'm not sure what you mean now. Did you intend your quote from the WCAG to support OP's point, or to indicate that the screen reader has a bug?
c22 1y ago
That's a programmed behavior of the screen reader and a limitation of the contextual awareness of the search engine. Apparently this has been an issue in the wild since at least 2001 so I don't know what to tell you.
crazygringo 1y ago
That's a screen reader problem and search engine problem. It would be an extraordinarily easy for screen readers to have a heuristic that whenever a link is just "click here" or common variations like "tap here", "click", etc., to read the entire sentence containing the link. It's not exactly rocket science. Yes, you need an internationalized list of strings to detect. Also, if aria-label is present, just use that. Likewise, search engines are great at inferring meaning from the page as a whole. I'm not going to change my link text for the benefit of search engines.
- cube00 1y ago
  > It would be an extraordinarily easy for screen readers to have a heuristic > Yes, you need an internationalized list of strings to detect. Who would maintain this list and be the authority for every language on Earth? We've managed to get this far without needing such a central dependency.
  - crazygringo 1y ago
    The screen reader developer. It's not a "central dependency" that needs an "authority". It's just part of building internationalized software. Shouldn't screen readers have intelligent heuristics to most appropriately convey context when required? Seeing as most of the web doesn't have accessibility annotations?
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
  Do you use `aria-label`, then?
- theteapot 1y ago
  In contrast, using descriptive link text does seem extraordinarily easy.
  - crazygringo 1y ago
    Except that it's not? As demonstrated by the entire internet. It forces you to write sentences awkwardly.
tgsovlerkhgsel 1y ago
IMO that's the problem of the screen reader/search engine. It's a fine line between "accessibility" and actively making things worse (i.e. less accessible) for the majority just to cater to a small group of screen reader users. That's similar to replacing all major doors in a building with automatic ones that can't be operated manually and take forever to open, despite the typical occupancy by wheelchair users being 0. Accessibility is great, but accessibility for few should not come at the cost of accessibility for most.
- cube00 1y ago
  That's not a fair comparison. Using accessible link text doesn't cost the same as adding an automatic opener to every door in a building.
Gormo 1y ago
"Download Amaya" as the link text makes the most sense in your scenario. A link that just says "Amaya" isn't any better than one that just says "click here" -- neither is sufficiently conveying that clicking the link will download the software.
- al_borland 1y ago
  I tend to agree with this as well. The "Click here" portion of "Click here to download Amaya" is implied by the simple fact that it's a link.
  - Retric 1y ago
    Making the entire thing a link is IMO the clearest option if you just want someone to download your app, but doesn’t work as well when you want a list of software and links for details. A list where: “Click here” to download “V 16.23.4” has two links one of which gives info on the download and their other starts a download is fine, especially if the info page also has a download link.
    - al_borland 1y ago
      As a user, I wouldn’t intuitively understand that “click here” is going to download a file and “V 16.23.4” is going to give me information. I’d assume they were both download links and be confused why there are 2 and which one I should click. If the download link is on the information page, a simple solution is just to send people to the information page where they can download. I tend to prefer that anyway. I find premature direct download links to be jarring where I’m not expecting it.
- eichin 1y ago
  Isn't this also better from a Fitts' Law perspective (for sighted mouse users) - simply because more text makes the "target" larger? (Not that I've seen a desktop browser doing anything sensible with artificially boosting hitbox sizes since the late 1990s...)
thousand_nights 1y ago
if i only read HN threads i'd assume 95% of users exclusively use some screen readers to read the web it's become a trope to the point i know i can ctrl-f "screen reader" if literally anything ui related is being discussed
- rhdunn 1y ago
  If you are doing front-end web development then you really need to have some knowledge about accessibility, screen readers, etc. so you don't make simple/common mistakes. More so if you are involved in addressing accessibility issues for customers/your company.
  - ThunderSizzle 1y ago
    Although he has a point - it seems overdiscussed compared to other types of accessibility or design topics.
    - int_19h 1y ago
      I dunno, color blindness is brought up just as often here IMO. On the whole I'd say it's a good thing because it means that the various awareness campaigns are working. Better that this kind of stuff is "overdiscussed" than not discussing it at all. And besides, this focus has some useful side effects. For example, pages designed with screen readers in mind are also that much easier to interact with from scripts and other automation.
- const_cast 1y ago
  Screen readers are deterministic website or web application navigation applications. Building for screen readers isn't just for the disabled, it's for you, too. That will become infrastructure for testing and automation.

xanrah 1y ago

I'm sorry, should we design websites around SEO, or should search engines just use context properly?

echelon 1y ago
Search engines and websites are going to be subsumed by LLMs, so it's not like this argument matters anymore.
- bigbuppo 1y ago
  The general consensus is that the dislike of AI is so strong, that a large chunk of the population will disregard something if they even think it is generated by AI. Also, the LLMs need a continuous feed of new, original material to ingest or they'll be all thumbs. While the long-running trend of SEO stuffing from low-value content farms has polluted search results for years now, Google didn't really care about fixing that problem because there's a perverse incentive to generate more ad revenue by making the first page results usesless. Who cares about doing the right thing? Daddy's got to get his quarterly numbers up. I should also note that those content farms were also early adopters of genAI as we know it today. Infinite growth isn't a thing. Every cancer eventually kills its host.
  - bee_rider 1y ago
    Are you sure that’s the general consensus about AI? HN has a very intense relationship with this stuff, because we have hardcore boosters and hardcore skeptics. Among people I meet offline the feelings seem a lot weaker in either direction.
    - bigbuppo 1y ago
      As best I can tell, your typical person here doesn't tend to hang out with normies, which definitely skews things.
  - echelon 1y ago
    > The general consensus is that the dislike of AI is so strong This is such an echo chamber. Most people love AI. It's one of the fastest growing types of content across all social media. The news media is telling us we hate it (eg. John Oliver, 404 Media), but this is not the mainstream consensus. Views and likes don't lie. "Normies" think this technology is magical. Some organs of the traditional news media are trying to skew their opinions.
    - cgriswald 1y ago
      I see constant comments on social media complaining something is AI sometimes even when it’s not. Those commenters are all viewing it but they aren’t choosing it. And “likes” absolutely lie because there isn’t a “dislike” option.
    - creata 1y ago
      > Views and likes don't lie. If you're saying you have relevant stats, then please, share the stats.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

rendaw 1y ago

At one point does accessibility decrease accessibility? I'm all for making improvements in the name of accessibility, but not so much about making things worse to support the least common denominator of screen readers. If people are going to need to change their behavior, wouldn't it be better to suggest some aria annotation instead?

hombre_fatal 1y ago
Aria tags are something you think might have more developer compliance than better anchor text? Most of us never wrote an aria attribute in our life. But I haven't used "click here" as anchor text in 20 years because it sucks for these reasons.
- rovr138 1y ago
  I think the links just need to be longer vs a couple of words. We are used to small areas, but the problem is that you end up with 'click here', like in the example. But if you linked the whole text, it's basically the same thing as adding aria. IMO, most cases that I see using aria seem like a fix after the fact vs doing it the right way. There are use cases for it, but in the case of the example, making the whole sentence a link would be good. Regarding screen readers, you can have it read all links, which is why the 'click here' is an issue. So you want a balance. Change "for x, <a href=...>click here</a>" "<a href=...>for x, click here</a>"... ta-da? You need to optimize for people using accessibility tools, but also for the people looking at the site...
  - Izkata 1y ago
    > Regarding screen readers, you can have it read all links, which is why the 'click here' is an issue. So you want a balance. Change "for x, <a href=...>click here</a>" "<a href=...>for x, click here</a>"... ta-da? No, you want the verb to be whatever "x" does or is for, not the action taken to get there. The action taken to get there is the same for all links regardless of what they're for. So this is a bad example simply because we don't know what "x" is so we don't know what a better verb would be.

layer8 1y ago

There are techniques to solve that, however: https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Techniques/html/H33 https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Techniques/html/H33 https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Techniques/css/C7 https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Techniques/css/C7

runarberg 1y ago
I never understood why the visually hidden has not been incorporated into the CSS standard proper (something like display: visually-none). Instead the standard is effectively recommending authors use a hack to do what is a very common pattern.
- layer8 1y ago
  It's a hack either way. Screen readers really should support the title attribute like they do for image links; or maybe HTML should have had an alt attribute for <a href> as well. When using a mouse pointer, you also want that information as a tooltip.

danillonunes 1y ago

The problem here is that the screen reader will just read the link text and not the contract around it. In this case, the correct examples proposed by W3C will read just as "Amaya”, which are almost as unhelpful.

burningChrome 1y ago
Even the WCAG level A success criteria clearly states: The purpose of each link can be determined from the link text alone or from the link text together with its programmatically determined link context, except where the purpose of the link would be ambiguous to users in general. https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/link-purpose-in-context.html https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/link-purpose-in-... Having a single word announced by the screen reader to me would fail this criteria.
- danlitt 1y ago
  together with its programmatically determined link context really is the operative phrase in this quote. I would encourage you to actually read the examples on the page you link to - several of them announce just one or two words.
  - burningChrome 1y ago
    OP's comment addressed that: The problem here is that the screen reader will just read the link text and not the contract around it. I would encourage you to read OP's comment first?
    - danlitt 1y ago
      I'm not sure what you mean now. Did you intend your quote from the WCAG to support OP's point, or to indicate that the screen reader has a bug?

c22 1y ago

That's a programmed behavior of the screen reader and a limitation of the contextual awareness of the search engine. Apparently this has been an issue in the wild since at least 2001 so I don't know what to tell you.

crazygringo 1y ago

That's a screen reader problem and search engine problem. It would be an extraordinarily easy for screen readers to have a heuristic that whenever a link is just "click here" or common variations like "tap here", "click", etc., to read the entire sentence containing the link. It's not exactly rocket science. Yes, you need an internationalized list of strings to detect. Also, if aria-label is present, just use that. Likewise, search engines are great at inferring meaning from the page as a whole. I'm not going to change my link text for the benefit of search engines.

cube00 1y ago
> It would be an extraordinarily easy for screen readers to have a heuristic > Yes, you need an internationalized list of strings to detect. Who would maintain this list and be the authority for every language on Earth? We've managed to get this far without needing such a central dependency.
- crazygringo 1y ago
  The screen reader developer. It's not a "central dependency" that needs an "authority". It's just part of building internationalized software. Shouldn't screen readers have intelligent heuristics to most appropriately convey context when required? Seeing as most of the web doesn't have accessibility annotations?
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
Do you use `aria-label`, then?
theteapot 1y ago
In contrast, using descriptive link text does seem extraordinarily easy.
- crazygringo 1y ago
  Except that it's not? As demonstrated by the entire internet. It forces you to write sentences awkwardly.

tgsovlerkhgsel 1y ago

IMO that's the problem of the screen reader/search engine. It's a fine line between "accessibility" and actively making things worse (i.e. less accessible) for the majority just to cater to a small group of screen reader users. That's similar to replacing all major doors in a building with automatic ones that can't be operated manually and take forever to open, despite the typical occupancy by wheelchair users being 0. Accessibility is great, but accessibility for few should not come at the cost of accessibility for most.

cube00 1y ago
That's not a fair comparison. Using accessible link text doesn't cost the same as adding an automatic opener to every door in a building.

Gormo 1y ago

"Download Amaya" as the link text makes the most sense in your scenario. A link that just says "Amaya" isn't any better than one that just says "click here" -- neither is sufficiently conveying that clicking the link will download the software.

al_borland 1y ago
I tend to agree with this as well. The "Click here" portion of "Click here to download Amaya" is implied by the simple fact that it's a link.
- Retric 1y ago
  Making the entire thing a link is IMO the clearest option if you just want someone to download your app, but doesn’t work as well when you want a list of software and links for details. A list where: “Click here” to download “V 16.23.4” has two links one of which gives info on the download and their other starts a download is fine, especially if the info page also has a download link.
  - al_borland 1y ago
    As a user, I wouldn’t intuitively understand that “click here” is going to download a file and “V 16.23.4” is going to give me information. I’d assume they were both download links and be confused why there are 2 and which one I should click. If the download link is on the information page, a simple solution is just to send people to the information page where they can download. I tend to prefer that anyway. I find premature direct download links to be jarring where I’m not expecting it.
eichin 1y ago
Isn't this also better from a Fitts' Law perspective (for sighted mouse users) - simply because more text makes the "target" larger? (Not that I've seen a desktop browser doing anything sensible with artificially boosting hitbox sizes since the late 1990s...)

thousand_nights 1y ago

if i only read HN threads i'd assume 95% of users exclusively use some screen readers to read the web it's become a trope to the point i know i can ctrl-f "screen reader" if literally anything ui related is being discussed

rhdunn 1y ago
If you are doing front-end web development then you really need to have some knowledge about accessibility, screen readers, etc. so you don't make simple/common mistakes. More so if you are involved in addressing accessibility issues for customers/your company.
- ThunderSizzle 1y ago
  Although he has a point - it seems overdiscussed compared to other types of accessibility or design topics.
  - int_19h 1y ago
    I dunno, color blindness is brought up just as often here IMO. On the whole I'd say it's a good thing because it means that the various awareness campaigns are working. Better that this kind of stuff is "overdiscussed" than not discussing it at all. And besides, this focus has some useful side effects. For example, pages designed with screen readers in mind are also that much easier to interact with from scripts and other automation.
const_cast 1y ago
Screen readers are deterministic website or web application navigation applications. Building for screen readers isn't just for the disabled, it's for you, too. That will become infrastructure for testing and automation.