Advanced Link Considerations and Interactive Elements
Links as Navigation Aids
Links are powerful aspects of digital documents that allow people to interact with the content in a variety of ways.
One of the ways that people with disabilities interact with links is to provide all of the links in a document as a separate list that can serve as a navigation menu for the document.
Having descriptive and human-friendly links allows an individual who is blind to perform the equivalent action of a sighted person visually "skimming" the content in search of the same link.
Order Matters
Because the list of links is presented in alphabetical order, we sometimes inadvertently create usability issues by naming our links with repetitive text, such as "click here".
It is best to use descriptive verbiage for your link Display text, so the user knows what they should expect when they click on the link.
So instead of "Click here to download syllabus" try "Download syllabus" instead.
Avoiding Repetition
One great way to avoid repetition is to never use "click here" as the anchors (Display text) for your links. However there are other common conventions that create issues of repetition creating ambiguity.
When you have a lot of links with the same text for their anchors, the navigation capability is not only diminished, it might be impossible for some users to sort out which of the many "click here" links they are trying to follow.
Another common technique is to use the verbiage "Read more..." At the end of a brief introductory paragraph or story as a lead-in to the main article.
Instead of "Read more..." use the title of the story as the beginning and finish the link with "continued here".
Ex: Title of the Story - continues...
ScreenTips (Local Installation of Word only)
Using the Add Link dialog in your locally installed version of MS Word allows you to add helpful text that will appear when someone hovers their mouse over a link. While not an accessibility requirement, adding ScreenTips can be helpful for people.