> By reading surrounding text

Yes, exactly, if ARIA tags haven't been provided. It's not exactly rocket science to have some heuristics that check if a link is solely "click", "click here", etc., and it reads the entire sentence if that's the case. Seems like it would work 99+% of the time with exceedingly little effort.

There's no expectation, and should be no expectation, that the function of a link should be derivable directly from the text it encloses.