Links That All Say Read More

How links get read out of context

Screen readers can present every link on a page as a list, so somebody can scan the destinations without reading the surrounding text.

That is a genuinely useful way to navigate, and it is roughly equivalent to a sighted person's eye jumping to the underlined text.

The list contains only the link text itself, with no surrounding sentence to supply any context.

Which means a page whose links all read more produces a list of identical entries with no way to distinguish them.

The two failing patterns

Generic text. Read more, click here, find out more, learn more, this page.

The full address as the link. A long string of characters read out character by character, which is genuinely unpleasant to listen to.

The first is more common and the second is worse when it appears.

Both fail exactly the same test, which is whether the link still makes sense read aloud with nothing else around it at all.

What good link text looks like

• Describes the destination, not the action of clicking.
• Makes sense alone, without the sentence around it.
• Is unique on the page, where destinations differ.
• Is long enough to tap, which rules out single words like here.
• Is not the full address.

Our bathroom fitting page, how a survey works, and prices for a typical kitchen all pass that test comfortably. Read more does not pass it at all.

Rewriting around it

The practical difficulty is that read more sits naturally at the end of a card or a summary, where the description came just before.

Three ways to handle it.

Make the heading the link, so the card's title carries the destination and no separate link is needed.

Extend the link text: read more about bathroom fitting rather than read more.

Or add visually hidden text within the link, so the screen reader hears the full version and the design shows the short one.

The first is usually the cleanest of the three and requires no additional markup at all.

A worked example

A services page with six cards, each with a heading, a sentence, and a read more link.

The link list read as six identical entries.

They made each card's heading the link and removed the separate read more entirely.

The link list became a list of the six services, which is what somebody navigating that way needed.

Two other things improved without being the goal: the tap target became considerably larger, since a heading is a bigger target than two words, and the internal linking became more descriptive, which helps search engines understand what each page covers.

The visual design was unchanged apart from the heading becoming clickable.

Same text, different destinations

A subtler failure worth checking.

Two links with identical text pointing to different pages is confusing, because the list shows the same entry twice with no way to tell them apart.

It happens with contact us appearing in several places pointing at different pages, or with a company name linking sometimes to a profile and sometimes to a website.

The reverse is fine and normal: the same text pointing at the same place repeatedly is not a problem.

Where two genuinely different destinations need similar text, the difference belongs inside the link itself rather than in the sentence surrounding it.

Where the link text comes from

Worth knowing, because on many sites nobody chose it.

Theme templates generate the text for card links, listing pages and archive summaries, and read more is the common default.

Which means the problem was never a writing decision and cannot be fixed by writing differently.

Most themes expose that text as a setting, and where they do not, it is a small template change.

Worth checking before concluding that somebody made a poor choice, since usually nobody made a choice at all.

Where generic text is acceptable.

A button in a form or a dialogue, where the context is unambiguous and the action is obvious: submit, cancel, close.

Pagination, where next and previous are conventional and understood, though adding hidden text naming the page number is better.

And a repeated element in a list where the surrounding structure genuinely provides the context, such as a table where each row's link relates to that row.

Even in that last case, assistive technology handles tables well enough that this is a real exception rather than an excuse, and it is worth verifying rather than assuming.

Images used as links

A related case with a specific rule.

When an image is a link, the alt text should describe where the link goes rather than what the picture shows.

A logo linking to the homepage should have alt text saying the business name and home, not a description of the logo design.

Where an image and a text link sit adjacent and point to the same place, the image should have empty alt text so the destination is not announced twice.

An image link with no alt text at all is the worst case, since the reader falls back to announcing the file name, which for most sites is a camera reference.

Links that open elsewhere

A related courtesy worth including.

A link opening in a new window or downloading a file behaves unexpectedly, and somebody who cannot see what happened may be confused about where they are.

Saying so in the link text handles it: the specification as a PDF, or opens in a new window.

File type and size are worth stating for downloads, since somebody on a limited connection wants to know before tapping.

And opening links in new windows is worth being sparing about generally, since it takes control away from the visitor and the back button stops working as they expect.

Checking your own

1. List every link on a busy page.
2. Read the list alone, without the page.
3. Mark anything generic.
4. Mark duplicates pointing to different places.
5. Make headings the links where cards use read more.
6. State when a link opens elsewhere.

The second is the whole test, and browser extensions will produce the list in a few seconds if you would rather not do it by hand.

The structural equivalent is covered in headings used for size rather than structure.

Frequently asked questions

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