Success Criterion 2.4.4
Conformance level A

ARIA Label That Overrides a Link’s Visible Text Incorrectly

2.4.4 — Link Purpose (In Context)

Scenario

Setting

An email client's compose window

What’s wrong

aria-label overriding visible text with something unrelated (purpose obscured — also 2.5.3).

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

Inspect the aria-label attribute in DevTools versus the visible link text: if the label describes something entirely different from what's shown, it fails.

How to fix

The link's purpose must be clear from its accessible name (or name plus immediate programmatic context), and unique among links going to different destinations.

<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 an email client's compose window, this barrier is gone for people who browse by links list or voice commands and need unambiguous link purposes — they can finish what they came here to do.

Who is affected