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Developing Effective Link Text

Susan Pollack

Instructional Support Specialist

Center for Support of Instruction

Published: July-August 2008

Category: » Online-pedagogy » Teaching-strategies

When devising link text, everyone knows not to "click here"—or do they?

From an accessibility standpoint, a basic tenet for creating link text is to ensure that it is meaningful. Readers need to understand what the link points to, and the link itself needs to make sense to them. A typical method for adding a link to a file is to copy a URL from the location bar of a browser and simply paste it where you want it in your document—and many programs, such as Microsoft Word, recognize certain text as a URL and automatically convert it to a link with the URL as the link text. The URLs, though important in and of themselves, become an afterthought in how they are presented to readers. In this article, we'll review the standards and best practices for developing effective link text so that the links you put in your Web-based documents are accessible and easy to understand.

Meaningful and Effective Links

In its Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, the World Wide Web Consortium—the same international standards group that developed the specifications for HTML—notes quite simply in regard to link text: "don't use 'click here.'" The main reason for this guideline is because the phrase says nothing about what the link points to; it is not meaningful to the user.

What makes link text meaningful? In a nutshell, link text is effective when it is short, descriptive, and able to stand alone; it needs to make sense out of its usual context.

Many people who have vision problems use screen readers, such as JAWS, to navigate Web pages. Instead of having an entire Web page read to them, these users can click the Tab key to jump from link to link. In turn, the text of each link is voiced to the user as "link, [link text]." Sequential links with the text of "click here" and "read more," for example, would thus come back to the screen reader user as "link, click here, link, read more." This information provides little value to the user out of its Web page context, as it provides no clues regarding the nature of what the links point to.

Some screen readers provide a list of links for the user as an additional way to navigate a Web page. The links list might list all the links on a page, all the links on a page that the user has visited (or not visited), or even a list of links that contain certain information requested by the user—such as all links on a page that point to the www.umuc.edu domain. A list of links generally uses the link text for its list and could very well contain information such as this:

Read more
Click here
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Again, out of context and without specific identifying information, "click here" makes no sense. Click here to do what? Similarly, "Read more" does not help orient the user; what topic is it referring to that you can read more about? By not providing contextual clues in your link text, it becomes very difficult for people with screen readers to navigate properly and use the Web as a source of information.

There is one good attribute about all the link text examples mentioned thus far: They all clearly meet the "short" requirement. These examples, however, are simply too short; with just a little more information added to them, they will likely contain enough description that will allow them to stand alone.

Consider a resume-like Web page that lists the various major resume categories (education, experience, etc.) on separate pages, accessible via links on the main page. A link worded as "Work Experience" is much shorter and more succinct than a link worded as "Page that explains more about my work experience"; the former link text is also more useful in part because it mentions the important information first. Likewise, "Work Experience" is more informative than just "Experience" because it specifies what kind of experience will be described; the reader will not confuse it with possibly being about teaching, educational, volunteer, or computer experience.

So, what can you use instead of "click here"? Clear, specific, and informative text like "UMUC home page" or "AAHE Fall Conference Schedule" or even "research procedures" will suffice. Such examples mean that you may have to change the way you write your text when you add in links. The following table lists some ways you can improve link text. (Note: The underlined text examples shown throughout this article are for demonstration purposes only; they are not active links.)

URLs as Link Text

Generally speaking, using a URL for link text, as described in the introduction to this article, is not recommended for a variety of reasons. If you ever look at products on a Web site such as amazon.com, you know that the individual URLs are quite long and contain various amalgamations of letters, numbers, and special characters that make no sense to the average reader (although they do make sense to specific programming scripts and databases). For example, the following URL points to the Amazon Kindle e-reader device:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000FI73MA/ref=amb_link_6369712_1/103-6672350-0066213?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-1&pf_rd_r=1VKAZEKEARQ8ZBQZ7HWC&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=379103301&pf_rd_i=507846

If you wanted to direct readers to this item, it would be perfectly fine to have this URL mentioned in your HTML code, but to have this URL be the actual link text might present a few problems.

First and foremost, the URL is long. WebAim, an organization that deals with Web site accessibility, notes that long URLs do not wrap over to the next line in some browsers, so links may get cut off from visibility or may change the intended width of the viewing area of the Web page—eventually rendering the page unattractive. Second, the URL as written just doesn't make sense to people who are looking at the screen. While it is fairly simple to see that it points to something on the amazon.com site, what exactly it is pointing to is another story. Third, if you were to use a screen reader to listen to a Web page that includes this URL as link text, the information voiced to you would be an essentially useless conglomeration of letters, numbers, and symbols that would also take too long to listen to. A much better way to name the link text in this case would be "Amazon Kindle device," which meets the three requirements of being short, descriptive, and able to stand alone.

That being said, however, it may be acceptable to use a URL as link text in limited circumstances. For example, an uncomplicated short URL such as "www.umuc.edu" is certainly preferable—and understandable—over the long amazon.com URL listed above. But don't take this instance as a go-ahead to use URLs as link text in your online documents; you're still much better off (as are your readers) creating link text that is concise, informative, and context independent.

Link Text + URLs

"But I want to provide the entire URL to my students in case they print everything in the classroom to read offline. If I use only meaningful text as the link, the URL will be invisible to them!"

The commentary above makes a valid point. As someone who has been an online student with a dial-up connection in the past, having URLs printed out is very handy indeed. Based on the best practices discussed here, it is possible to combine these two separate ideals without ruining the appearance of a Web page or making it difficult, if not impossible, for screen reader users to understand.

One possible solution is to make use of the WebTycho Webliography in a way you may not have before. The Webliography allows you to enter the name of a Web site, its URL, and a brief description. Some faculty fill this area at the start of the semester, others add items as the semester moves along, and others encourage students to contribute to the list. By filling the Webliography with the sites you want students to visit as they are noted in your main text (whether in Class Announcements, Course Content, or even Conferences), you can keep the meaningful link text in your main text and reserve the spelled-out URLs for the Webliography, reminding students periodically to check it for updates.

A second option is to provide the URL directly after the link text, as demonstrated in the following example:

Check out the courses on the UMUC Web site (http://www.umuc.edu).

In this example, the words "UMUC Web site" are the link text, which follows the three rules and works well for screen readers. The URL which follows is not a link, however, and that may initially confuse some readers. It does add some clutter to the page and may detract from readability. Even so, this method would work fine if the URLs are more or less short. However, when URLs start to get long, they take up page space (sometimes in an unwanted manner) and may get in the way of efficient reading and scanning of information.

A third option, depending on where the text links are in the classroom, is to prepare your text as you normally would with appropriate link text, and then at the end of the document list all the links mentioned on that page and put the corresponding URL next to it. For example:

Links in this document:
UMUC Web site (http://www.umuc.edu)
UCEA Web site (http://www.ucea.org)

This method might work for individual pages in, say, Course Content. But it would be difficult to implement this in an area like Class Announcements unless you were to include this information at the end of each announcement (rather than the end of the page itself).

If you use the Webliography method, your main text pages will be neat and clean, and students will have one-stop access to all the important links you want them to visit. The key issue, though, is to be consistent and use the same approach throughout your classroom.

References

• WebAim Web site
• World Wide Web Consortium Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 on Link Text