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Re: Link labels and APA citations

for

From: Bourne, Sarah (ITD)
Date: Oct 21, 2014 9:14AM

Whenever I am trying to work out the correct way to handle an accessibility conundrum, I ask myself, "What is the original point or purpose of this thing?" In the case of a bibliographic citation, it is to tell the reader where my information came from. This includes the author(s), a title, and information on where it is/was published. This information can be very unattractive reading, but it is not prose or standard navigation, it's a data record formatted in standard ways that have evolved over hundreds of years. (And are still evolving as new publishing channels appear.) It's unattractiveness is a part of why this information is pulled out of the main text and put in footnotes and bibliographies to begin with.

A journal title or publisher tells a reader familiar with the field something about the authenticity or reliability, and so does a URL. Was it published on a university website, or at Wikipedia, or as an electronic version of something published in a refereed journal?
1) Obscuring it with a redirecting "short URL" obscures that information, and leaves you with two URLs that can break in the future, which may prevent you from using a service like Archive.org to find that original version.
2) Hiding the URL inside a link on the title means users have to take an extra step to reveal that information.

Having a URL be the link text for itself isn't listed as a failure for SC 2.4.4 or 2.4.9. It's just a failure against a "best practice" that has to do with the usability of links in most other contexts. When you look at a bibliographic citation as a data record, it would be better to not make the URL clickable than to hide it.

sb
Sarah E. Bourne
Director of IT Accessibility
Massachusetts Office of Information Technology
Commonwealth of Massachusetts
1 Ashburton Pl. rm 1601 Boston MA 02108
617-626-4502
<EMAIL REMOVED>
http://www.mass.gov/itd