Clear Links, Confident Landings

Navigating a website is a little like bringing a plane into a busy airport. Your approach to the destination needs to be clear and concise, especially when there is already plenty competing for your attention. If two links use the same language but guide you toward two different runways, there’s going to be preventable confusion. You thought you knew where you were headed, and now you’re circling the digital terminal, wondering whether you missed a sign. Imagine choosing “Volunteer opportunities” from the main menu and finding a list of available roles, then choosing “Volunteer opportunities” on another page and landing directly in an application. Both pages belong on the site, but they serve different purposes. “Explore volunteer opportunities” and “Apply to volunteer” give people the information they need before they commit to the approach. No surprise landing required.

How good intentions develop a few loose connections

Most websites do not arrive fully formed and perfectly organized. They grow a page at a time, usually while the people maintaining them are doing six other jobs and trying to remember whether they ate lunch. Someone adds a program, someone else updates the menu, and a perfectly reasonable button gets copied into three different places. Eventually, the site develops a few well-intentioned detours. That is understandable, especially for a small organization, and it is exactly why following your own links occasionally is worthwhile. We know our organizations well enough to fill in the gaps without noticing them. A visitor has no such backstage pass. They have the words we put on the screen and whatever those words have taught them to expect.

When a familiar label leads somewhere unexpected, the visitor has to sort out the mismatch before they can continue. Did they click the wrong thing? Is this a different program? Where was that useful page they found a minute ago? Now the person who came to volunteer, find a service, or ask for help has been recruited as an unpaid website detective. For someone who has difficulty with memory, attention, or processing information, that extra work can make an already demanding task harder to follow. They may need to retrace their steps, reread information, and hold several possibilities in mind while deciding what to do next. We can spare them some of that effort by making the difference between destinations clear in the first place.

“Read more” leaves a little too much to the imagination

“Read more” looks harmless enough. It is short, familiar, and fits neatly beneath almost anything, which may explain how it became the beige cardigan of website links. When it sits below a title and description, someone looking at the whole card may understand exactly what it means. But a screen reader user may browse a list of links without hearing those descriptions alongside them. A list that says “Read more,” “Read more,” and “Read more” offers about as much direction as an airport sign that says “Somewhere over there.” The person can go back and investigate the surrounding content, but that is another task we have added to their journey. A few descriptive words could have answered the question before it came up.

“Read more about cognitive accessibility” tells someone what is ahead, while “Continue to Clear Links, Confident Landings” identifies the article they are about to open. You can also make the article title itself the link and let it do the work. This does not mean every label needs to grow into a miniature essay with its own table of contents. “Apply to volunteer” is brief and useful; “Download the volunteer handbook (PDF)” explains both the content and the format. The goal is to include the information that helps someone choose, without making them reconstruct the page around the link. Clear enough to recognize. Short enough to use.

What W3C guidance says about the route

W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or WCAG, give us a useful foundation here. 2.4.4: Link Purpose (In Context), Level A allows a link’s purpose to be understood from its wording or from context that assistive technology can associate with it. That means “Read more” is not automatically a failure, although simply placing it near a heading does not guarantee the necessary connection. 2.4.9: Link Purpose (Link Only), Level AAA goes further, calling for a way to understand the purpose from the link text alone. Descriptive wording is helpful because it travels with the link when someone encounters it apart from the surrounding page.

There is also 3.2.4: Consistent Identification, Level AA, which addresses consistent identification of repeated components that perform the same function across a set of pages. Consistency does not always mean identical wording, and two links with the same text but different addresses are not automatically a WCAG failure. Their purpose and context matter. Still, a recurring route should feel recognizable, and different purposes deserve labels that explain the difference. We can use the guidance to make thoughtful decisions without turning a content review into a courtroom drama over every button. The practical question remains: does this wording help someone understand their next step?

The scanner may see a link. A person has to follow it.

A link can contain text, accept keyboard focus, and open a functioning page while still delivering a visitor somewhere they did not expect. An automated scan may catch some problems, but it may not recognize that one “Volunteer opportunities” link offers a list of roles while another launches an application. As far as a basic check is concerned, the link may look present and operational. Lovely. The visitor still needs to know where it goes. Following the route and comparing the wording with the destination adds the human judgment a scan may leave unresolved. That is why reviewing the experience matters alongside checking the code.

Start with one task people commonly come to your site to complete, then approach it from a few different directions: the main menu, a homepage button, and a link inside a related page. Before opening each link, consider what its words lead you to expect; afterward, check whether the page delivers that experience. Keep a simple list of the labels and their destinations so you can compare them without performing a heroic feat of browser-tab memory. If one route explains a program and another starts an application, give them wording that reflects those jobs. For article cards, read the link labels by themselves and ask whether you could still choose the piece you wanted. These are manageable checks to include when a page changes, rather than saving every loose connection for a mythical quiet week when nobody needs anything.

A clearer approach, a more confident landing

People arrive at a website with a purpose, whether they want to find an opportunity, understand a service, or ask for help. They may already be tired, distracted, or worried about what happens next, and the website is only one part of their day. Giving them a clear route respects the attention they have available. Sometimes that means changing two words on a button; sometimes it means noticing that an old link still points to a page the organization has outgrown. We do not need to make every journey elaborate. We need to make the next step understandable and the landing recognizable, so people can spend their energy on what brought them there. A little less circling. A little more common ground.