See Understanding Techniques for WCAG Success Criteria for important information about the usage of these informative techniques and how they relate to the normative WCAG 2.0 success criteria. The Applicability section explains the scope of the technique, and the presence of techniques for a specific technology does not imply that the technology can be used in all situations to create content that meets WCAG 2.0.
HTML and XHTML
This failure relates to:
This describes a failure condition when the context needed for understanding the purpose of a link is located in content that is not programmatically determined link context. If the context for the link is not provided in one of the following ways:
in the same sentence, paragraph, list item, or table cell as the link
in the preceding heading
via a suitable ARIA property such as aria-label
or aria-labelledby
then the user will not be able to find out where the link is going with any ease. If the user must leave the link to search for the context, the context is not programmatically determined link context and this failure condition occurs.
A news service lists the first few sentences of an article in a paragraph. The next paragraph contains the link "Read More...". Because the link is not in the same paragraph as the lead sentence, the user cannot easily discover what the link will let the user read more about.
<p>A British businessman has racked up 2 million flyer miles and plans to
travel on the world's first commercial tourism flights to space.</p>
<p><a href="ff.html">Read More...</a></p>
An audio site provides links to where its player can be downloaded. The information about what would be downloaded by the link is in the preceding row of the layout table, which is not programmatically determined context for the link.
<table>
<tr>
<td>Play music from your browser</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<a href="http://www.example.com/download.htm">
<img src="download.jpg" width="165" height="32" alt="Download now"></a>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
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Locate links where some additional link context is needed to understand the purpose of the link. For each link:
Check whether the context is contained in the same sentence, paragraph, list item, table cell, associated table headers, or preceding heading.
Check whether the link context can be programmatically determined in some other way, for example, by using a WAI-ARIA property such as aria-label
, aria-labelledby
or aria-describedby
on the link to provide sufficient context
If check #1 AND check #2 are false, the content fails the Success Criterion.