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Thread: Are ambiguous links awful even when there's surrounding context?
Number of posts in this thread: 6 (In chronological order)
From: Isabel Holdsworth
Date: Fri, Apr 26 2019 7:57AM
Subject: Are ambiguous links awful even when there's surrounding context?
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If the "View more" link is in a paragraph of its own, which they often
are, then it will constitute a WCAG2 fail because the link isn't in
the same context as its surrounding content.
Hope this helps.
On 02/04/2019, Maupin, Brennan Polaris McCaffrey - maupinbp
< = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = > wrote:
> I am new to this so take my opinion for what it is worth, but if I am
> correct, if there is surrounding text that provides context, it is AA
> compliant. I am aware that you cannot use guidelines to pass/fail something;
> however, it is useful that in a couple of their advisory techniques w3c
> gives specific examples of unclear (out of context) links in enclosed lists
> preceded by descriptive headings.
>
> I was actually pretty surprised that this was this was passing criterion. I
> have always heard it is best practice to use descripting link text for the
> links-list-view on screen readers. That looks like it is AAA criterion,
> however.
>
> -Brennan Maupin
>
>
From: Jeremy Echols
Date: Fri, Apr 26 2019 10:36AM
Subject: Re: Are ambiguous links awful even when there's surrounding context?
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In our case, the "view more" link is in a list item element directly after other list items, where the list itself is given a heading. I *think* it's got context, but it's not entirely clear to me if items in a list are considered to be within the same context as the other items and the heading.
Below is an example of the HTML:
<h2>Authors</h2>
<ul>
<li><a ...>Jane Doe</a></li>
<li><a ...>Joe Smith</a></li>
<li><a ...>View More</a></li>
</ul>
From: Graham Armfield
Date: Mon, Apr 29 2019 12:11AM
Subject: Re: Are ambiguous links awful even when there's surrounding context?
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Could it not just say 'View more authors'?
Regards
Graham Armfield
Coolfields Consulting
From: Jeremy Echols
Date: Mon, Apr 29 2019 12:32PM
Subject: Re: Are ambiguous links awful even when there's surrounding context?
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In a perfect world, yes, but it's an application we run that we didn't create, and which has a surprising amount of complexity when trying to override the UI. So we're trying to prioritize what to fix first. This kind of problem seems like a lot of work for relatively minimal gain compared to other issues, but I wanted to double-check.
From: Brian Lovely
Date: Mon, Apr 29 2019 1:43PM
Subject: Re: [External Sender]Are ambiguous links awful even when there's surrounding context?
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My gripe about "view more" links is that when a user leverages a feature
like NVDA's list of links, they just see a bunch of links with generic text
and have no idea what they're for.
On Mon, Apr 29, 2019 at 2:32 PM Jeremy Echols < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = > wrote:
> In a perfect world, yes, but it's an application we run that we didn't
> create, and which has a surprising amount of complexity when trying to
> override the UI. So we're trying to prioritize what to fix first. This
> kind of problem seems like a lot of work for relatively minimal gain
> compared to other issues, but I wanted to double-check.
>
>
From: Jeremy Echols
Date: Tue, Apr 30 2019 6:39AM
Subject: Re: [External Sender]Are ambiguous links awful even when there's surrounding context?
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Yeah, as I say it's far from ideal, we're just trying to decide if they're top priority.
In this case, you'd get a list of probably 50 links where 3 would be "view more" and the rest would be out-of-context facets like an author's name. I don't know that a list of links would be very useful without the surrounding heading that tells you it's an author filter. Especially since some of our authors are actually entities like "United States. Bureau of Land Management. Prineville District".
When an article is shown, its title is linked, but these facets are where things get a bit complicated.