Notes from the a11y underground #2

Stomme poes says:

There is a pattern I’ve been seeing, very often for “cards” (those large clickable lumps of crap, usually organised into a list, which tend to contain a buttload of content, often with various semantic markup): Developers continue to wrap anchors around these huge piles of text, then throw an aria-label with what would normally be decent, concise link text. However this overrides the buttload of text inside, which sighties get to read.

I’ve also seen, though less often, similar for paragraphs in cards even when a link is not wrapping everything, like on our national train website.

When they don’t use an aria-label, then users get superlongbooksworthoflinktext,sometimes with or without the semantics depending on how the AT deals with stuff inside links. I’ll fail long pages of prose as link text because that makes figuring out where the hell the link goes extra difficult for a group of users simply because they’re using text-to-speech software. Links should ideally be succinct and tell me clearly where the hell it would take me should I click it.

Now currently we recommend “don’t fricking do that” and say to wrap the anchor around the bit of text serving visually as the main link text (there’s almost always something that fits the bill) and use JS or maybe a complex CSS trick to make the whole area clickable. But it seems this is not scratching an itch or developers haven’t heard of this technique as often.

Offering the ability to set something as the link label for a group and the rest of the content as-is should the user choose to go read all that seems to be something developers want, but to make aria-label do that job, behaviour would have to change and it seems it would be more complex for a browser to know whether the resulting tree should then entirely replace the link (or paragraph or whatever) content with the label. This also just seems to be a problem of people not knowing how to use the tools as they currently work to have sane names, summaries and content chunks. It seems changing things to meet this need, while maybe a cowpath-paver, is sort of like changing the laws to let drivers run red lights because lots of people do it.