Success Criterion 2.4.4
Conformance level A

Link Name So Long It Buries the Link’s Actual Purpose

2.4.4 — Link Purpose (In Context)

Scenario

Setting

A social media platform's settings menu

What’s wrong

Excessively verbose link names — an entire card's text concatenated into a single link announcement, burying the 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

Read the link's full accessible name aloud: if an entire card's text has been concatenated into one link name, burying the actual purpose in verbosity, 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 a social media platform's settings menu, this barrier is gone for people who browse by links list or voice commands and need unambiguous link purposes — they can complete the task without hitting this wall.

Who is affected