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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 ju

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.
rhdunn 1y ago
Screen reader heuristics are the wrong approach. If you want to use "click here", "download", "pdf", or something generic then use aria-label, aria-labelledby, or some other mechanism to give the additional context to screen readers and other assistive technologies. There's no need for any heuristics other than those in the specifications that the screen readers, web browsers, and web sites agree/conform to. There may not be a surrounding sentence (e.g. in a "PDF"/"Download" link). The surrounding sentence may not add any/enough additional context, e.g. "You can click here for help." or "To view the article [one of many] you can click here.". You then run into issues where 1) the screen reader/AT is overriding the ARIA/a11y markup on the page against WAI-ARIA and WCAG standards; and 2) you can end up with different behaviour on each screen reader, in addition to the places they already differ. It's bad enough when web browsers introduced heuristics on form labels such that "name" + "label" fields were detected as a login form and other situations where bad heuristics were used and the web browsers overrode what websites were specifying.

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.

rhdunn 1y ago

Screen reader heuristics are the wrong approach. If you want to use "click here", "download", "pdf", or something generic then use aria-label, aria-labelledby, or some other mechanism to give the additional context to screen readers and other assistive technologies. There's no need for any heuristics other than those in the specifications that the screen readers, web browsers, and web sites agree/conform to. There may not be a surrounding sentence (e.g. in a "PDF"/"Download" link). The surrounding sentence may not add any/enough additional context, e.g. "You can click here for help." or "To view the article [one of many] you can click here.". You then run into issues where 1) the screen reader/AT is overriding the ARIA/a11y markup on the page against WAI-ARIA and WCAG standards; and 2) you can end up with different behaviour on each screen reader, in addition to the places they already differ. It's bad enough when web browsers introduced heuristics on form labels such that "name" + "label" fields were detected as a login form and other situations where bad heuristics were used and the web browsers overrode what websites were specifying.