Link purpose

WCAG has two criteria here and the difference between them is the whole subject. 2.4.4 Link Purpose (In Context) asks that the destination be determinable from the link text together with the context a machine can find: the sentence, paragraph, list item, or table cell the link sits in. 2.4.9 Link Purpose (Link Only) raises the bar to the link text alone. Most teams are asked to meet the first and would be better products if they met the second, because the second is the one that survives the way links are actually used.

The reason is that links are routinely read outside their sentence. Screen readers offer a list of every link on the page, which is one of the fastest ways to navigate a long document; voice control users say the link’s name to activate it; sighted readers scan for the blue words and never read the paragraph around them at all. In all three cases the link is on its own. A page of five “Read more” links produces a list of five identical entries, and a reader has to go back into the page and read around each one to rebuild what the words were supposed to say.

Fixing it is usually a matter of moving the words already on screen. “Read more” beside a heading becomes the heading, and the sentence loses nothing. Where the visible text genuinely has to stay short, aria-label can carry a longer name, but it has a trap attached: WCAG 2.5.3 Label in Name requires the accessible name to contain the visible text, so “Read more” may become “Read more about renewals” and must not become “Renewals”. A name that does not contain what the reader can see is a name they cannot say, which breaks voice control while looking like a fix in the audit tool.

Two smaller rules come out of the same idea. Links with the same text should go to the same place, since a list of links is read as a list of destinations, and two “Details” entries that lead somewhere different make that list a lie. And the destination is part of the purpose: a link that opens a PDF, a new tab, or another site should say so in its text rather than in a title attribute or an icon nobody hears, which is the same argument the change of context criteria make about warning before acting.