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Comment by Pxtl | Hacker News Reader

The first one confuses me.

He says "click here" isn't helpful, in isolation but that's not helpful to a sighted person either. In context? Do screen-readers fall over on links present mid-sentence, like saying I have the article on my block you can [click here] to read it?

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I've not used screen readers much, but you can skip through links as a mode of navigation, but if all the links are "click here" "click me" "click" "get the info" then it's harder to keep track of which links go where.

Of note, you can use the ARIA label attribute to customize this for many users:

https://www.deque.com/blog/text-links-practices-screen-reade...

In addition to the points that pbhjpbhj and Grumbledour have made, in badly written HTML the 'Click Here' link might be in a completely different part of the DOM tree to the rest of the content. For example, a developer could create a <p>Content</p> at the top of the DOM tree, and a <button>Click Here</button> at the end, and then use "position: absolute" to move the button next to the content. Visually they're next to each other but if you strip out the styling they're miles apart. Screenreaders do a decent job of trying to figure out what link goes with the text but understanding HTML is a crapshoot at the best of times.

While I can't speak for the author, I have a few blind friends who use screen readers. They often access a list of all links in a page to navigate, but naturally, you get only the text of the link in this list. I suspect the same problems occurs if you use tab to go from link to link. Surrounding content is of course not read aloud unless requested.

I personally don't have a problem with that kind of link. I read comments one line at a time. The screen reader says: "article on my block you can link click here to read it? " I then press k to focus the link and enter to activate it.

What drives me mad are things like buttons or lists on a form that aren't even visible to the screen reader, date fields that pop up an inaccessible calendar just to fill in a text box, but the text box is read only so you can't just type the numbers, and so on. It's not the lack of image descriptions or even headings that is the problem with modern sites, it's that some are completely unusable with a screen reader.

I'm a bit confused by it too but I can image quite often the click here button is some absolute positioned element that is not necessarily after the relevant text in dom.

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