WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

RE: Repeating the same link phrase

for

From: Jukka Korpela
Date: Sep 2, 2002 2:43AM

Timothy J. Luoma wrote:

> I have a download page where documents are available in
> multiple formats:
[ arranged into a table ]

This is a tough case.

I think the essential questions of the case are outside the scope of
specific WCAG 1.0 guidelines and Section 508 rules. Rather, it's a matter of
what's really accessible. (We always face the risk of concentrating
compliance with accessibility rules, rather than actual accessibility.) But
let's look at the guidelines and rules first.

> "Do not use the same link phrase more than once when the
> links point to different URLs."

That's a good guideline, and there are several reasons to it, including what
happens when the links are accessed via a list of all links on a page. When
you focus on a link, physically or mentally, a link name such as "PDF" gives
insufficient information. For example, if you can see a small area on screen
only, due to eyesight problems, or if you have difficulties in understanding
wider context (from the visual or other environment of an item), you _need_
better info; you _need_ link names that are reasonably self-contained.
(Besides, it's better food to search engines too; there are facilities for
searching for occurrences of words in link texts - and this is one reason
why link texts should reflect the _topic_ of the linked resource.)

> <A href="my-doc.html">My document is available in HTML</A>,
> <A href="my-doc.pdf" title="My document in PDF">PDF</A>,
> <A href="my-doc.txt" title="My document in text">plain text</A>
>
> However, that technique does not satisfy the Bobby AAA checker.

Using title attributes can useful (though not that much in a case like
this), but it's nothing to be relied on. Advisory titles, that's what they
are. They don't address most of the problems,

> Now writing this out over and over again:
>
> "Download Document 1 in PDF"
> "Download Document 1 in Word"
> "Download Document 1 in ZIP"
>
> seems a bit over-the-top.

Surely that "Download" is superfluous. As a rule of thumb, a link text
should not contain a verb in the imperative.

But even when simplified to "Document 1 in PDF" etc., the link texts easily
become rather long. If the document title, in place of the generic "Document
1" above, is longer than a couple of words, the table becomes big -
difficult to read, hard to listen, requiring quite some width for simple
display, etc.

So a natural solution would be to replace the table with a linear
presentation: Put first a list of document names, and make them links that
point to corresponding sections on the page. It's probably a good idea to
precede that table of content with a statement like "The documents listed
here are available in the following formats:..." or something like that.
Each section would consist of links to the different versions. Then the link
texts could be relatively long. The problem remains that in speech
synthesis, the document name would be repeated, though just a few times,
since the user would normally "jump" directly to the relevant section.

(Note that this is _not_ a case of replacing a layout table by a more
appropriate construct. The table is perfectly structural. But the structure
is difficult to present visually or otherwise, when the table cells contain
a lot of text, as they should.)

So my suggestion is not ideal. The ultimate problem is that we are doing
media type selection at the level of explicit page content and markup,
rather than via an automated content negotiation mechanism that hides such
technical issues. It's a necessary evil at present, of course, but we
shouldn't thus feel too bad if our solution is not ideal.

Besides, the HTML format is probably what people select when they need an
accessible version, so if you put that alternative first, they can simply
follow a link to the appropriate section and follow the first link there.

--
Jukka Korpela, senior adviser
TIEKE Finnish Information Society Development Centre
http://www.tieke.fi
Phone: +358 9 4763 0397 Fax: +358 9 4763 0399


----
To subscribe, unsubscribe, or view list archives,
visit http://www.webaim.org/discussion/