"Click Here" Means Nothing to a Screen Reader

ClearPath Team · 2026-09-29 · 5 min read

Picture your blog index with its links read out of context, one after the other: "Read more. Read more. Read more. Click here. Learn more. Read more." That's roughly what a lot of pages sound like to a screen reader user who pulls up a list of links. Every item is technically a link. None of them tells you where it goes.

It's one of the most common accessibility problems on the web, and one of the cheapest to fix.

How people actually use a screen reader

Sighted visitors skim. They glance at headings, spot a bold phrase, and jump. Screen reader users do the same thing with different tools. Rather than listening to a page from top to bottom, most of them jump through its structure.

WebAIM's screen reader user survey has asked about this for years. In the most recent edition, about 72 percent of respondents said they navigate long pages by their headings. The other big shortcut is the links list: NVDA, JAWS and VoiceOver can all pull every link on the page into a single list the user can scroll or search. In that list, each link is read on its own, stripped of the sentence around it.

So the text inside the link is doing double duty. It's part of your sentence, and it's also a label in a menu. "Click here" works as part of a sentence. As a label it's useless.

How common is it?

Very. The WebAIM Million, which tests the home pages of the top million websites every year, found ambiguous link text like "click here", "more" and "continue" on 15.2 percent of home pages in its February 2026 run. It also found empty links, links with no text at all, on 46.3 percent of home pages. Those are usually icon links: a magnifying glass for search, a social media logo, an arrow on a carousel. A screen reader either says nothing useful or reads out the raw URL.

Remember these are home pages, usually the most polished page on the site. Blog indexes, product grids and footers tend to be worse.

What WCAG asks for

The relevant rule is 2.4.4 Link Purpose (In Context), Level AA. It says the purpose of each link should be clear from the link text alone, or from the link text together with its surrounding context, like the sentence or list item it sits in. There's a stricter AAA version, 2.4.9, which asks for the link text alone to be enough.

The "in context" part gives you some slack, but not as much as people think. Screen readers can announce the surrounding context if the user asks for it, but that's an extra step, repeated for every link. Aim for link text that makes sense by itself. It's better for everyone, including sighted users skimming the page and search engines trying to work out what the target page is about.

Rewriting links without rewriting the site

Most of the fixes are small edits to copy:

• Put the destination in the link. Instead of "To see our pricing, click here", write "See our pricing plans" and link those words.
• Make repeated links distinct. On a blog index, link the article title rather than a "Read more" under each card. If the design really needs a "Read more" button, give it hidden text so it's announced as "Read more about accessible checkout forms".
• Name your icon links. Every icon-only link needs an accessible name, through visually hidden text or an aria-label. "Search", "Follow us on LinkedIn", "Next slide".
• Say when a link does something unexpected. If it downloads a file or opens a new tab, say so: "Annual report (PDF, 2 MB)".
• Don't link the URL itself. Hearing "h t t p s colon slash slash" read out character by character is nobody's idea of a good time.

A decent content editor can clear most of this in an afternoon. The icon links need a developer, but usually just a line or two per component. If you're an agency rolling ClearPath out across client sites, this is a good job to pair with the install: the widget covers the visual side of links, and your team fixes the words.

Visible links matter too

Link text is mostly a screen reader issue, but how links look matters for other visitors. Links that are only distinguished by a slightly different shade of text are hard to spot for people with color vision deficiencies or low vision. ClearPath includes a link highlighting tool that outlines every link on the page, so a visitor who struggles to tell links from plain text can switch it on and see them at a glance. Its read aloud tool can also speak text on hover for visitors who find reading tiring.

Try this today: open your homepage, turn on VoiceOver or NVDA, bring up the links list, and listen. If you can't tell where half the links go, neither can your visitors.