Link Purpose (Link Only)

What it asks

This is 2.4.4 with the safety net removed. At AA, link text “in context” passes — the sentence before, the table row around, the card heading nearby. At AAA, the link text on its own must be enough. The use case is screen-reader users pulling up a Links List dialog and hearing every link out of any context whatsoever; if “Read more” sits in that list 12 times, they have no way to choose.

It’s also a useful target for any team that cares about cognitive accessibility, because self-describing links benefit users with ADHD, dyslexia, and memory differences too.

How to meet it

• Replace every generic CTA (“Read more,” “Learn more,” “View”) with destination-specific text: "Read the 2026 accessibility report".
• For card layouts where the design needs a short CTA, hide additional context inside the link with a .visually-hidden span: Read more <span class="visually-hidden">about the 2026 report</span>.
• For repeated row actions in tables (Edit, Delete), use aria-label to inject the row context: aria-label="Edit invoice INV-2204".
• Avoid aria-labelledby chains that depend on visible text outside the link, since the exception for “programmatically determined context” applies at AA, not AAA.
• Audit by extracting every <a> text on the page and asking whether each one alone tells you where it goes.

Common failures

• Card grids with 20 "View details" links, each going somewhere different.
• “Here” links inside paragraphs — even when the sentence is clear, the link alone is not.
• Image links with empty alt text, no visible text, and no aria-label.
• Pagination links: just 1 2 3 4 5 with no page-context (“Page 3 of search results for X”).
• “Click here to subscribe” link where “Click here” is the anchor and “to subscribe” is outside the link.

Why it matters

Screen-reader links-list mode is faster than reading line-by-line, and many experienced JAWS and NVDA users navigate that way as a default. AAA conformance to 2.4.9 makes a site fully usable in that mode. Most teams aiming at AA won’t formally commit to this SC, but adopting it as a writing rule for all new content costs nothing and quietly fixes one of the more common pain points in screen-reader use.