Introduction
When you're writing a blog post, you're creating a hypertext document, which can have hyperlinks to other documents or a location within that blog post. Hyperlinks are a key part of the World Wide Web, and you likely use them all the time. Here are a few ways you can make links in your blog posts more accessible!
Making Links Descriptive but Short
One of the ways a screen reader can navigate a page is by skipping through the all links, so it helps to make sure that links actually describe where they're linking to. Phrases like "click here" and "read more here" and "link" don't really tell folks anything about the link, and listening to a list of them would be really confusing!
Similarly, it would be pretty annoying if you listened to a list of links on a page and several of them were entire sentences, or worse, an entire paragraph. Try to make links as concise as possible while still being descriptive. For example, instead of "Click here to see pictures of me and my family," a link could say: "My Family Pictures." This also helps people who use speech recognition to click links; shorter links are easier to say.
Making Links Stand Out
One of the concepts discussed on the color page is that color shouldn't be the only thing that conveys meaningful information. This applies to links, too. If color is the only thing that distinguishes a link from the surrounding text, certain people (such those who are colorblind) may struggle to identify them.
An underline is the most common and widely understood way to indicate something is a link. Hopefully your blog's theme underlines links; to avoid confusion, don't use underlines in any other scenario. If you want to emphasize something, you can make it bold or italic instead.
Another helpful way to make a link stand out is having a hover effect. When you hover your mouse pointer over links in this article, you can see that they lose their underline and change color. This effect is another indication to someone that the text is a link.
Tip
Link color, underlines, and hover effects are usually determined by your blog's theme. If you have the ability to choose your theme, try to find one that already has underlines on links. It's much easier to let the theme do all the work behind the scenes!
If you're not in charge of the theme yourself and it doesn't have links underlined, you can ask whoever runs the site to change the CSS; self-hosted WordPress will let you add custom CSS, for example, as well as some paid plans on Wordpress.com. Alternatively, you can apply an underline to any links you make in a blog post, but that can be easy to forget.
Signposting Files and New Windows
Sometimes links go to files, like PDFs or audio files. It's a good idea to let people know when a link goes to a file rather than a regular HTML page. It allows folks to decide if they want to download it, and helps avoid confusion.
Here's an example of how to warn a user ahead of time: Demo File (PDF). Note that the file type (PDF) is included within the link, so screen reader users will hear it when skipping through links.
It's also important to let people know when a link opens in a new window or tab. Blogging platforms often let you check a box for a link to open in a new tab, and it might seem like that's a good idea; it means your website stays open in their browser, right? But it can be confusing, both for screen reader users and for people with cognitive disabilities who weren't expecting it. They might expect the back button to take them back to your site, but it won't if the link opened in a new window.
There are several different ways to indicate that a link opens in a new window, such as using an icon with alt text, but the easiest way is to simply include it in the link, like the PDF example above: Google (opens in new window).
Resources
There are several more aspects to links not covered here, so feel free to check out the resources below if you want to learn more!