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Re: Displaying links with same content in a Table

for

From: Jared Smith
Date: Feb 26, 2010 11:24AM

I think you've pretty well identified all of the issues. The question
is whether the potential problems are worth the effort of implementing
a solution.

Under WCAG 2.0, there are two success criteria that address this.
2.4.4 (Level A) requires that the links make sense by them self or in
their context. In this case, the table headers provide the necessary
context. Of course in most cases, the context is virtually worthless
for screen reader users navigating by links, which is a primary method
of navigation (http://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey2/#finding
and http://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey/#homepage).

Under 2.4.9 (Level AAA) the links must make sense all by themselves.
These links clearly do not.

So you can leave it as it is and screen reader users must explore or
navigate the context to determine the link purpose, or you can modify
the links so they make sense by themselves. Because you're using
images, this is very easy - just expand the alt text to include all of
the necessary information (e.g., "Dataset 1 Raw Data in CSV Format" or
similar).

Jared Smith
WebAIM.org