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.
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-...
Having a single word announced by the screen reader to me would fail this criteria.
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?
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.
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.
When using a mouse pointer, you also want that information as a tooltip.
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.
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...
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.
I think that signals to visitor using screen readers and without, what that is and how to interact with it.
If someone with a screen reader is jumping through links, they'll get context for the link. A visitor not using it will see get the context since it's all highlighted together. Someone using a keyboard, the outline will highlight all of it.
I am just a keyboard user. I have no idea if this is the best way. But I think it gives the same info to everyone.
Please consider reading the rest of this thread before you keep fighting developers to do it your way.
After that if you still want "click here" that's your call but at least be open to better alternatives rather this dismissing this discussion.
With enough experience you learn that what is obvious is less obvious than it appears.
Click this hypertext link: <a href="more-info.html">More Info</a>
Put the device specific call to action outside of the link, and make the link say what it links to, not what physical action to take to follow the link.
Anyway, mobile phone touch screens don't click. Saying "click here" is like using a floppy disk as a save icon.
Obviously for the same reason you also should not say "touch here" either. Touching your desktop computer's screen doesn't work unless you have a touch screen, which is rare.
That's the point, why saying "click here" or "touch here" is always wrong.
...have you ever used a mobile phone? Clicking is the only action you can take on one.
> Anyway, mobile phone touch screens don't click.
Let's check the dictionary!
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/click
- (verb) 2. [intransitive] To emit a click.
Phones don't do that, but that can't be relevant to the text "click here" because that text is directed at the user, not at the phone.
- (verb) 5. [transitive, graphical user interface] To select a software item using usually, but not always, the pressing of a mouse button.
Hmm....
Or is your entire point that you think it's actually a good idea to put the words "click here" in links? Then explain why?
Are you saying that you need links to say "click here" in order to understand what to do?
Then how did you manage to navigate to this discussion and press the reply link, which did not say "click here"?
Do you not think this looks like superfluous noise at all?
click here for mat_b click here for 1 hour ago | click here for undown | click here for root | click here for parent | click here for prev | click here for next click here to collapse [–]
bla bla bla
click here for reply
It is an interesting point, because in 2001, what is a link was usually clear and standardized: blue, underlined, often both, like on the article page. Now, just look at Hacker News, only the links in comments are underlined, and they have no special color, you have to mouse over if you want to know. And Hacker News is not in any way special in that regard.
So I would argue that "click here" is more relevant now than it once was. Same idea for buttons by the way. They used to look like, well, buttons, often with a 3D look. Now, there is often no real difference between a button and regular framed text. It means we need more context to guess which is which.
accessibility is usability. build products that are usable by people. that's all.
So of course usability can decrease usability, readability can decrease readability, accessibility can decrease accessibility, beauty can decrease beauty, and all those desirable traits can decrease each other, because there is no one single "technique" you just apply mindlessly to achieve any of those goals.
There are many many ways of achieving (and ruining) each of those goals, and you constantly have to balance and trade them all off against each other.
If somebody is so lazy and careless and poorly educated that they always use links saying "click here" as a solution to their problem of not being creative enough to come up with a better more descriptive link, I can guarantee you 100% of the time they are not going to give a flying fuck about aria or even have a clue what it is.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
If you're saying you have relevant stats, then please, share the stats.
it's become a trope to the point i know i can ctrl-f "screen reader" if literally anything ui related is being discussed
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.
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.
Using accessible link text doesn't cost the same as adding an automatic opener to every door in a building.