In one of a series of guest posts here on the Alledia blog, Brian Teeman discusses accessibility and “read more” links on Joomla sites:
Read more and Accessibility
Clear and concise hypertext links are key to creating accessible website navigation.
But perhaps the most important issue for Joomla site administrators is ensuring that link text makes sense out of context.
Screen readers can create a list of all available links on a page to aid navigation, taken out of context a link such as “read more” makes little sense. To see this in action select “page info” from the Tools menu in firefox and then the links tab
A typical joomla blog category will display a list of meaningless links all with the same title, “read more”.
WCAG 13.1 Guidelines state: “Clearly identify the target of each link.”
Link text should be meaningful enough to make sense when read out of context – either on its own or as part of a sequence of links. Link text should also be terse. For example, in HTML, write “Information about version 4.3” instead of “click here”.
Not only is “read more” uninformative when taken out of context it is not unique. Check your own blog category pages and you will see multiple links that all appear the same to your users using assistive technologies.
A simple solution is to follow the advice Barrie North gives in his blog:
“I have always advised Joomla webmasters to to use a great mambot from Run Digital. It makes the read more link include the title of the article, great for SEO.“
Once again this shows that taking into consideration the needs of ALL your site visitors, and not excluding those using assistive technologies, has a benefit for all your users and your site in general.
You can find the Run Digital mambot at this website: http://www.run-digital.com/download/readmore_bot.html
There are many other ways to improve the accessibility of your hyperlinks. Do you have a tip to share?