Recently I was able to see how a blind person uses JAWS, the most popular screen reader. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this technology, screen readers are software that read the content of a web page to the user. A person could use it to read the page from top to bottom and identify any links in the content as it goes. However, this is clunky and slow. Imagine how frustrating it would be to not be able to scan a page to look for the links you want, but to have to go through the content piece by piece, in order, from top to bottom. Rather than doing this, the screen reader can facilitate a type of scanning by presenting a list of every link on the page separated from the content. This list could either be in order or alphabetized. If the person wanted to get to the Contact Us page, for instance, it would be easily found in an alphabetized list.

 

Now imagine a page with a bunch of “more” and “click here” links. To the person who can scan and see the surrounding text, this may seem just fine, but once these links are pulled out of context by the screen reader, you can imagine the frustration of a list with 5 or 6 “click here” links! The best practice is to have your links actually mean something, for instance, instead of “more”, use “read more about our latest news.” This may seem clunky at first, but this leaves no surprises in what the site visitor is going to get.

 

Alternatively, offer another way to navigate to the item. This blog software adds the “more” links but the blog titles are also links. This offers the best of both worlds for sighted and non-sighted visitors. Having the blog titles as the only link to the whole story would not be intuitive for sighted visitors, so the “more” links offer usability to this group and the titles offer a clear link for visitors using a screen reader.