"Click here to read this article" "Read More" Why these are bad for screen readers?

accessibility, css, html, screen-readers, xhtml

Solution

You have to understand that many screen reader users don't wait for the whole page to be read to them. They use keyboard shortcuts to navigate around the page. JAWS (arguably the most common of screen readers) has several very useful shortcut key combinations. One in particular pulls up a list of all of the hyperlinks on any given page. This way the user doesn't need to wait for the reader to get to the section of the page they're interested in before finding out what kind of links the page contains. They can just use the shortcut and get a list of links all at once on demand.

It's when using the list of links shortcut that your "Read More" links are completely useless. When viewing a huge list of all the links on the page, the user is simply read the text inside the tags. There is no context. The user has no idea what preceeds or follows the "Read More" text. All they know is there's a link for them to "read more" about something. This gets especially confusing when there is more than one link like this on the page. The user also does not generally listen to the URL, as that's pretty much worthless given all the insane query strings and the computerized voice struggles with reading URLs.

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