Success Criterion 2.4.4
Conformance level A
W3C reference F63

Link’s Purpose Explained Only in Unrelated Page Text

2.4.4 — Link Purpose (In Context)

Scenario

Setting

A government tax-filing portal

What’s wrong

The text explaining where a link goes is somewhere unrelated on the page — a screen reader user reading just the link (and its immediate context) can't tell its purpose.

Example

<a href="/report.pdf">Click here</a>

Why it matters

People who browse by links list or voice commands and need unambiguous link purposes.

How to test

Pull up a screen reader's link list: if the link's purpose is explained only in unrelated text elsewhere on the page (not the link text or its immediate context), it fails.

How to fix

Put the identifying context in the link text itself or in its programmatic context (same sentence, list item, or table cell).

<a href="/report.pdf">Download the Q3 financial report (PDF)</a>

Link text needs to describe its destination on its own, without relying on surrounding sentence context.

Outcome

On a government tax-filing portal, this barrier is gone for people who browse by links list or voice commands and need unambiguous link purposes — they no longer have to work around this.

Who is affected