Empty Links Do Not Mean Empty Brain

I make mistakes. We make mistakes. All humans make mistakes. This is understandable. But if we do not fix our mistakes, that is called a mistake.

WebAIM had analyzed the top 1,000,000 websites. The result that I want to highlight is that 45.4% of the home pages (or 454,000 pages) have empty links. WebAIM ran an accessibility check on the home pages only. We do not know about the rest of the pages from each of the one million websites.

I am fine when web developers forget to label links. I am fine when web developers sometimes miss something. Forgetting to give a few links an accessible name is okay. But those developers need something. For sure, each of them does not need a brain because they have one already. We just need to fill the brains with knowledge.

To fix links without any text, those careless web developers can add text. But they may be lazy. They just add useless phrases such as "click here," "link," or "here."

To ensure each link has an accessible name, a good web developer needs to tell the purpose of the link with a specific destination. For example, if the link is about an article from Smashing Magazine, Designing Better Links For The Web, then I can naturally lead my readers to read the article so they know how to design better links. I just did it. An unpopular problem can come from the hover effect for the link elements, which I wrote about it.

I think empty links can be hard to notice, especially when the website has thousands or even millions of pages. For humans, checking each page one by one is hard. But, hey, we do not live in the Stone Age. We have great developers who have developed a tool check all links to ensure every link has an accessible name.

Additionally, to prevent our website from having broken links, we have a talented programmer who develops a tool to spot them.

We have no excuse to allow empty links to stay on the websites we develop, just like we need to wear clothes to go outside.

Happy linking!