Link Purpose (In Context)

29th March 2025

3 min read

What is Link Purpose & why is it important?

> Key point: this helps people with vision & cognitive disabilities.

Link Purpose (In Context) is about assisting people to understand the meaning of a hyperlink.

This is very important for people with sight & cognitive disabilities who use screen reader software to hear page links as they skip between them, moving down a webpage.

For example, a link that only gets announced as “learn more” does nothing for vision impaired people that use a screen reader to understand available page links, especially when the page has lots of “learn more” links.

On a webpage, that example would appear as something like this:

“Accessibility is an essential for inclusive digital content. Click to learn more about accessibility.  

Good user experience should make it easy for people to use digital content. Click to learn more about user experience.”

Someone using a screen reader to hear those page links would only hear “learn more, link”, with the next link also announced as “learn more, link”.

Without context to explain links, someone with a vision or cognitive disability may be excluded.

How to create good Link Purpose:

When it comes to creating good Link Purpose, it is possible to choose one of the following two options; 

• Create a more descriptive, meaningful link name to help explain the context better. This is the best option because it assists the most people.

• Use WAI-ARIA to provide more description for screen readers.

With a more descriptive, meaningful link name, our previous example would instead look something like this:

“Accessibility is an essential for inclusive digital content. Click to learn more about accessibility. 

Good user experience, should make it easy for people to use digital content. Click to learn more about user experience.”

Now someone using a screen reader to hear those page links would hear “learn more about accessibility, link” , with the next link announced as “learn more about user experience, link”.

Doing that provides context & purpose to links.

Link Purpose (In Context) 2.4.4 is one of many required Success Criteria of WCAG that is crucial to have for digital content to be considered accessible & more inclusive.

Contact me today if you wish to know more about Link Purpose & any other digital accessibility query.