With awareness of accessibility guidelines increasing we’ve seen an increase in support queries regarding accessibility diagnostics.

Helen Grimbly, Support Lead at Sitemorse has recently responded to some support requests on the following accessibility diagnostic:

H30 - Providing link text that describes the purpose of a link for anchor elements

The objective of this technique is to describe the purpose of a link by providing descriptive text as the content of an <a> element. The description lets a user distinguish this link from other links in the Web page and helps the user determine whether to follow the link. The URL of the destination is generally not sufficiently descriptive.

We often see this diagnostic when the same text has been used for links to different URLs within a single page.

We often see this in Headers and Footers where links are used without unique description text.

To resolve this diagnostic, you can use the title attribute, so the title can be different but the visible text the same for both links, e.g. <a href="/contact" title="Contact x">Contact</a> 

When using a screen reader, the description of the links are read back to the user, using the title if it exists and the unique description will help to distinguish between the links.