Corporate end matter and non-meaningful links
This is a very, very specific one! But if you happen to work in the pharma industry, like I have for most of my career, you may be very familiar with this very tricky issue.
Of course we need to use meaningful link text for all links in digital materials. It's an accessibility and ADA requirement. Most of the time, for links within the content of the material we're producing, we're able to convince our writers (on the agency side) and our clients that meaningful link text is important, and moreover, it's required. However, most of our clients have standard corporate end matter that must go at the bottom of certain digital pieces, e.g. webpages or emails, and this language is 100% standard across all brands belonging to that corporation. Unfortunately, this corporate end matter often contains non-meaningful links, usually a "click here" or two. So this makes whatever digital piece we're working on non-compliant.
Our client, representing just one brand, does not have the power to approve a change to this corporate-wide language. Effecting a kind of change like this would require the authority of someone higher up in the client's company, and it would have to be implemented across all of that company's brands, affecting all of their marketing materials; that's thousands of digital pieces. It's the kind of thing that might get changed at the corporate level every few years, and all brands belonging to that corporation would have to implement it together at the same time.
So where does that leave us with our non-ADA-compliant "click here" in the website's or email's end matter? I invented a work-around that's not perfect but I believe it gets the job done...
So, let's say this is the standard corporate-issued language in the end matter for all of a pharma company's emails:
The brand's med-legal team requires that this exact language appear, and that the link is displayed exactly like it's treated above, i.e. just on the words "click here."
The problem is that a user of screen reader software who's tabbing from link to link would simply hear "click here" as the link, with no context about where the link goes. Thus, it's not meaningful link text, and therefore not ADA-compliant.
What's the fix? Take a look at this:
It's the exact same thing, right? But now hover your mouse over the whole sentence if you're on desktop, or tap on it if you're on mobile. The entire sentence is one long link; it's just been styled to show "click here" as blue and underlined, while the rest of the text is styled to be black and non-underlined. (I just made the link go to Google for the sake of this conversation.)
Now a person using screen reader software and tabbing through links will hear the full sentence as the link; "To unsubscribe from these emails, click here." But visually, to appease the client's med-legal team, we have treated the link the way that they require.
I really doubt you need to see the html and css for this, but here it is just in case.
So, under normal circumstances, this link would look like this:
With my fix, you'd code it like this:
And then you'd put this in your css file to assign the text styles that create this illusion:
color: #000;
text-decoration: none
}
.blue-underlined {
color: #00c;
text-decoration: underline
}
Of course my class names are a bit silly here; I just wanted to make this extremely clear as to what's going on — you can name those classes whatever you want! As long as they agree in the css and the html markup.
Further thoughts
This method I've outlined above should really be used only as a last resort. We should never happily accept workarounds for accessibility and ADA compliance. For links in body content, we should always fight the good fight. The language of links in body content is something our clients can approve the change of. As digital professionals we should always explain to them why this is important, and convince them to allow for a change that's compliant. It's usually not too hard once we've helped them understand why.
It's worth mentioning, we should avoid all instances of "click here" language (no matter how they're linked), because mobile users tap. "Click here" is just a very old-fashioned term; telling people they have to click on things is something we had to do in the very early days of the web. As creatives and as digital professionals we can come up with way better copy than that. Right?
– Manning
Questions/comments? Feel free to contact me at manning@manningkrull.com. I update these articles pretty frequently — best practices evolve over time as the world of digital quickly changes, and I always welcome insights from others.