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Re: Click Here.

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Feb 16, 2006 4:50PM

On Thu, 16 Feb 2006, Kynn Bartlett wrote:

>> So if i was using a screenreader and asked for all the links on a page
>> what is more helpful:
>
> This is a faulty assumption. Links in web pages aren't meant to be
> yanked out of context.

You might think so, but in fact they _are_ yanked out of context, just as
normal text is. Search engines do it all the time. People do it all the
time.

> It's hypertext,

Hypertext is text that contains links. There's not much magic in it, and
it's not an ideology. In the early days of the web, there were many people
who exaggerated the use of links - even saying that every word should be a
link (to a dictionary entry if nothing else). Experience has shown that it
is better to use links mostly as organized into link lists or as
references used sparingly e.g. at the end of a document, a section, or
perhaps a paragraph. Pure inline links tend to make texts harder to read,
and they make many people nervous, since they don't know whether they
should follow every link or not. They are not comfortable in speech
browsing either. When you hear a link in the midst of a statement, you
have little way of knowing whether you should follow it or not, and
following it later is not convenient. It's better to have things read
first as text without links, then perhaps followed by a statement like
"The document [link] foobar contains more detailed information about
[link] zip and [link] zap."

> and it's structured context for a reason.

Structured context? Structure and context are two different things.
Anyway, for _understandability_ especially to people with cognitive
disabilities, the text should be as readable as possible "out of context"
too. If the reader has to remember much of the context, many people simply
won't, even if they have no serious _intellectual_ difficulties in
understanding the content.

Aiming at link texts that are understandable out of context helps to make
the entire text more understandable.

> And, yes, there are many cases in which "click here" alone is just
> silly, but it's not a huge accessibility problem, and yet I've been
> amazed how many web accessibility folks seem to think that, oh my
> gosh, we'd better fix that right away, it's a major error.

It's a common mistake that is easy to fix, once people understand the
issue. This is a good reason to keep reminding of it - which is a
relatively new message being carried out. Actually I had never seen a
document summarizing the basic arguments against "Click here", so I
wrote one: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www/click.html

> They're all identical, but you'll find people who would swear up and
> down that "click here" somehow ruined everything, as if blind folks
> using the web would have no idea what this alien "click" concept could
> possibly ever mean.

When a blind person starts using the web, he may or may not have an idea
of what "click" means. It is still an unnecessarily alienating expression.
Besides, it gives misleading information to _everyone_. On all browsers I
have used, clicking on a link is (at most) _one_ way of following a link,
and other methods can be more suitable in particular contexts. Many people
are ignorant of the other methods, and "click here" helps in keeping them
ignorant.

--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/