Did you know a Google search for the phrase "click here" returns some 2,210,000,000 results? Probably not, as I imagine searching for such phrases is not the way you like to spend your free time, but it’s true nonetheless!
What this means is that on over 2 billion pages, Web authors are using the words “click here” to link to other pages.
That may sound like useless knowledge, but when you consider the fact that something like 22,000 Brits use screen reading software to browse the Web, that’s quite shocking.
A screen reader is a piece of software that, as the name suggests, reads the contents of a Web page, usually for the blind or partially sighted. Popular commercial products include JAWS, Microsoft Narrator and the proprietary system Browsealoud.
When a fully-sighted person browses the Web, they can read the whole of a paragraph that contains a link, and choose whether or not to click that link based on its context, so if we see a sentence that reads “click here for information on properties in Spain”, we know that clicking that link shown in bold will take us to a page about Spanish properties.
Users of screen readers don’t have that luxury. If they want to “click” a link, they first have to tab through the entire list of links on that page, listen to the text of each link, then either “click” it or move to the next one.
So a blind user’s audio experience of our fictional property page might work something like this: “home”, tab, “about”, tab, “contact us”, tab, “click here”, tab, “privacy statement” etc (where “tab” indicates the user moving to the next link).
The problem is compounded when you have more than one “click here” link on a page: for example a list of news headlines and summaries.
Unfortunately many Web developers have a strange knack of following rules exactly to the letter when it comes to W3C guidelines, so rather than using the phrase “click here” they use the phrase “find out more” or something similar, but that’s just as problematic because it means nothing when out of context.
For more information, see the W3C’s guidelines on link text.
