Don’t use the words “click here” or “more” as link texts
Monday, March 6th, 2006
Jakob Nielson reminds us of why link texts that say “click here” or “more” are horrible usability mistakes in his latest alertbox column.
Because the IRS page was long and overwhelming, the user decided to have her screen reader device read out the list of links on the page. Further, because the user was looking for tax rules about “donations” she commanded the screen reader to read links that started with a “D.” As it turns out, the IRS uses the term “deduction” rather than “donation” — something the user would never discover from a simple page or site search using the word “donation.” However, because both words start with “D” and the person was using a screen reader, she easily happened upon “deduction” as the correct link. A joyful outcome, but one that’s purely due to good luck.
In his column, Nielson continues to explain that this screen reader feature that reads links only doesn’t work when the text of a link is “click here” or “more” because it make no sense out of context of the surrounding content.
His example above also demonstrates why your link text should be short and to the point. In his example, the user he describes would have never found the “donation” link at all—luck or no—if the link text was something like “Click here for deductions.” The user wouldn’t search for links that start with a “c” because the word “donation” doesn’t start with the letter “c.”
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