What it is
Link text is the actual clickable words of a link — in "Click here to see our pricing", the words "click here" are the link text, even though "pricing" is the word actually carrying the meaning in that sentence. This check looks for links with vague, generic text like "click here", "read more", or "link", as opposed to descriptive text that indicates where the link actually leads.
Many screen readers include a feature that lets a user pull up a list of every link on a page, out of the surrounding sentence context entirely, specifically to jump around a page quickly — which is exactly the situation where generic link text stops working.
Why it matters
When a screen reader user pulls up that list of links out of context, a page full of links that all say "click here" or "read more" gives them no way to distinguish one destination from another — they're left with a list of identical, meaningless entries instead of a genuinely useful way to navigate the page's content. Even without using that specific feature, hearing a link announced simply as "click here" mid-sentence gives no advance indication of where it leads before deciding whether to follow it.
This is a purely written, no-code fix — unlike many accessibility issues, it doesn't require any technical change, just choosing different words for the same link.
How to fix it
- Search your page's content for generic link phrases like "click here", "read more", "learn more", or "link" used as the entire clickable text.
- Rewrite each one so the link text itself describes the destination — "See our pricing plans" instead of "click here for pricing", for example.
- For a "read more" link following an article summary, consider making the article's own title the clickable link text instead of a separate generic phrase.
- For icon-only links (like social media icons), pair them with an
aria-labeldescribing the destination, similar to the fix for icon-only buttons. - Test with a free screen reader's links list feature (available in NVDA and VoiceOver) to confirm each link now reads as distinct and meaningful on its own.