WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: 2.4.4 Link purpose (In context)

for

From: glen walker
Date: Mar 6, 2020 4:05PM

Birkir: "In my interpretation 2.4.4 is about accessible name of links, not
visible text."

Yeah, kinda sorta. It's definitely about links but not necessarily about
the accessible name. You could have a crappy accessible name of "read
more" and if that link was embedded in a paragraph, technically it has
context so would pass 2.4.4. But if I bring up the list of links on the
page, all I'll hear is "read more" without the context. It's a terrible
user experience and requires the user to hunt for the context. Yes, some
screen readers have shortcut keys to let you read the paragraph or the
table cell where the link is contained, but it still requires one to do
more exploring than you should have to do.

I always lean towards 2.4.9 even though it's AAA. I'll use aria-labelledby
on "read more" links so that it's labelled by itself ("read more") as well
as whatever context it should be associated with, whether a heading or a
sentence or even a few key phrases from a sentence. That makes the link
sound beautiful with the screen reader and also makes it sound good when
you bring up the list of links.

But from a conceptual view, Birkir is right. Sometimes I get a bit OCD
about the technicalities.

Back to Sumit's question, there seems to be some confusion that the
remediation suggestion (whether to use aria-label or aria-labelledby or
whatever) affects which success criteria to use for the failure. The two
are unrelated. How you fix a problem has nothing to do with the success
criteria.

And going back to 2.4.6, as noted earlier, 4.1.2 says a form element, such
as a button, has to have an accessible name. As long as a name can be
computed (and role and value), then it passes 4.1.2. The name of the
button could be terrible, such as "click here", but technically it has an
accessible name so 4.1.2 is ok. Where it would fail is 2.4.6. The button
has a name/label but the name/label does not describe the purpose.

So when working with buttons (or other form elements), 4.1.2 and 2.4.6 come
into play.
When working with links, 2.4.4 comes into play.

Just be careful because your original question said "if link doesn't have
descriptive link purpose, then it'll fall into 2.4.4". If it doesn't have
a descriptive purpose *by itself*, it doesn't necessarily fail 2.4.4. If
it's not descriptive even with its context, then it would fail.


And now for our next fun topic, what's the difference between "labels" in
2.4.6 and "labels" in 3.3.2? Both have a definition link in the success
criterion but the links point to the same place.

To me, 3.3.2 is similar to 4.1.2 in that it says the label has to exist.
It could be a crappy label, but if it exists then 3.3.2 would pass.
Whether it's a good label is up to 2.4.6.

It would have been fun to have these discussions at CSUN.