Your daily frequent11y newsletter, brought to you by @ChrisBAshton:
The endless search for “here” in the unhelpful “click here” button
- Eric Bailey articulates all the reasons why you should stop using links and buttons with the text value “here” or “click here”. This is such a common mistake across the web and is a habit we need to break out of.
- Compare the following two sentences:
- Click here to learn about how to roast Brussels sprouts
- Learn how to roast Brussels sprouts
- The former makes no sense out of context. If a screen reader user pulls up a list of all links in the page, they’re not going to know what “click here” is referring to. “How to roast Brussels sprouts” is the main action, and makes sense on its own. The latter also has a greater surface area to click on. Finally, some users activate links by saying the name of the link; the latter works well for that, whereas the former would be problematic if there were several links called “click here”.
- Now consider these instructions: “Click the button below”. There are two problems here:
- “Click” only makes sense in a desktop/laptop mouse context. It doesn’t make sense for keyboard or touchscreen users. Yes, they’ll probably still understand what to do, but that doesn’t mean we can’t use more universal language, such as “Select”.
- “Below” is also problematic. What if our content has been translated into a vertically-oriented language, and therefore makes no sense? What if the design is different for desktop, such that the link ‘below’ is actually to the side? What if we’re reading this in VR – does “below” now mean someone will think it’s underneath them? The web is a highly malleable place. Better to use language like “next/previous” or “following/preceding”.
- Eric ends by pointing to the proposed CSS Logical Properties module. This favours “start/end” properties rather than the more traditional “top/right/bottom/left”, as the latter have an implicit default writing mode of left-to-right & top-to-bottom – not a good look for a global technology.
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