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How to make “Read more” links accessible

• “Read more” links are a poor experience for screen reader users, who often browse the web by navigating lists of every link in the page. Therefore, each link should make sense when read out of context; “read more” doesn’t.
• This article lists six different ways to improve your “read more” links:
  1. Change the link text to be more descriptive, which has the benefit of benefiting sighted users too.
  2. Hidden text within the link, e.g. Read more <span class="sr-only"> about what Digital Access do</span>
  3. Remove the “read more” link – it often repeats a link slightly further up in the DOM, so has no real purpose.
  4. Nest the “read more” link in a contextual element. This was a new one for me: WCAG actually allows links that don’t make sense out of context, provided it is nested in an element that does provide the context, which might be a paragraph, list item, table cell, whatever. Screen readers can be made to “read the current sentence” relatively easily, so screen reader users can get context this way, though it is less intuitive.
  5. Use aria-label on the link, to replace the link text.
  6. Use aria-labelledby to reference other text on the page (such as the heading). <h2 id="heading">Digital Access</h2><a id="read-more" aria-labelledby="read-more heading">Read more</a> would be read out as something like “Read more Digital Access, link”.
• EDIT: a previous version of this dai11y article may have implied that “read more” links are universally inaccessible. The reality is more nuanced than that. They make for a poor user experience, but many implementations are not inherently inaccessible. There’s a dedicated “Read more” example on Success Criterion 2.4.4: Link Purpose (In Context) which confirms that these links don’t fail that SC, provided that the context can be derived from the surrounding paragraph (solution number 4 in the article above).

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