Accessibility and Read More Links in Joomla

Written by Brian Teeman

In one of a series of guest posts here on the Alledia blog, Brian Teeman discusses accessibility and "read more" links on Joomla sites:

Read more and Accessibility

Clear and concise hypertext links are key to creating accessible website navigation.

But perhaps the most important issue for Joomla site administrators is ensuring that link text makes sense out of context.

Screen readers can create a list of all available links on a page to aid navigation, taken out of context a link such as "read more" makes little sense. To see this in action select "page info" from the Tools menu in firefox and then the links tab

A typical joomla blog category will display a list of meaningless links all with the same title, "read more".

WCAG 13.1 Guidelines state: "Clearly identify the target of each link."

Link text should be meaningful enough to make sense when read out of context - either on its own or as part of a sequence of links. Link text should also be terse. For example, in HTML, write "Information about version 4.3" instead of "click here".

Not only is "read more" uninformative when taken out of context it is not unique. Check your own blog category pages and you will see multiple links that all appear the same to your users using assistive technologies.

A simple solution is to follow the advice Barrie North gives in his blog:

"I have always advised Joomla webmasters to to use a great mambot from Run Digital. It makes the read more link include the title of the article, great for SEO."

Once again this shows that taking into consideration the needs of ALL your site visitors, and not excluding those using assistive technologies, has a benefit for all your users and your site in general.

You can find the Run Digital mambot at this website: http://www.run-digital.com/download/readmore_bot.html

There are many other ways to improve the accessibility of your hyperlinks. Do you have a tip to share?

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Your Comments (12)

Yannick Gaultier

January 23, 2008

Hi Steve,

Just a reminder : sh404SEF also insert item title in read more link - both in the visible text and as a title attribute of the html link. I am on the lookout for other similar changes that maybe I could implement. Any suggestions ?

Steve Burge

January 23, 2008

Hi Yannick

Its hard to come up with more suggestions as you work so fast

I'd forgotten that about sh404SEF. Its a useful tip and one that confirms sh404SEF as the best SEO solution for Joomla!

Brian Teeman

January 23, 2008

That's great to hear Yannick

Another thing that you should probably consider is a method of offering visual cues to links

Research has shown that people with learning disabilities or dyslexia respond better to icons that indicate a purpose.

An idea would be to add different icons to all links on the site that indicate if the link is internal, external and even external in a new window.

It is generally considered to be bad to open a new window without first informing the user as this can cause issues with many assistive technologies

Rick Russell

January 23, 2008

Not sure if this addition was included in the 1.5 SEO Patch or default Stable 1.5, but inside the article manager(Joomla 1.5 Stable Joomla 1.5 SEO Patch), while editing content under Parameters - Advanced, I have an "Alternative Read More Text" Option. I have edited this to be different than the default, however, nothing is being displayed. It might be attributed to my template as well.. I'm hoping this will be included by default in Joomla 1.6.

Brian Teeman

January 24, 2008

Yes it is there in advanced paramater option for articles in joomla 1.5. However like you I cant get it to work with the default template.

Brian Teeman

January 24, 2008

The paramater does work with the beez template just not with rhuk_milkyway

Yannick Gaultier

February 15, 2008

Hi,

Brian, can you confirm if this feature (title added to Read more links) will work only with Beez ? cause I have removed that feature from sh404SEF for J! 1.5, but it looks it will be needed by regular templates ??
As for suggestions, it is indeed feasible. I have already made a "hidden" feature which redirect outbound links, so it can be done. I'll give it a try

Regards

Brian Teeman

February 16, 2008

It will work with any template as long as a template override is present with the correct code in it

Yannick Gaultier

February 21, 2008

Hi Brian and all,

I have just uploaded a new version of both sh404sef for J! 1.0.x and 1.5.x, with the requested feature of adding a visual symbol to outbound links. This can be switched off in the backedn, and you can also choose between a white and a black symbol, depending on your site background. In the 1.5.x version, I have also put back the "nsert title in read more links", as I can guess from the discussion above that many templates won't have override and therefore Joomla built in function will not be used by most. In the 1.0.x version, I have added the ability to set a fixed default Itemid per component. So that if a link is missing Itemid, you can be sure it will go to the correct page anyway.
You can them at http:://download.siliana.net, in Test versions category

Regards

Brian Teeman

February 23, 2008

Great stuff. I look forward to finding the time to test it. I guess I should install it on my new site

Brian Teeman

February 28, 2008

Today a patch was made to the joomla 1.5 tree that enables the advanced readmore functionality in all templates and just Beez so expect to see it in 1.5.2

Space Zone

July 20, 2008

hey Brian Teeman
I already installed Joomla 1.5.2 on one of my sites could u tell me where I can find the patch that you talked about in your last comment?