It’s the right time to go global. Whether you are a global business giant or a local enterprise, you need to make your presence strongly felt in the virtual world. Your success depends to a large extent how your profile and portray your business with …

In reference to this particular topic, our research has shown that the jump to links feature is widely used, however I’ve not seen anything on whether it is more or less used on a blog versus a traditional informational site, ecommerce site, etc.

Perhaps someone reading this will have more information they can share with us.

And thank you for taking the time to reply to my previous posts. I enjoyed our conversation!

The audio file you link to however only seems to go about halfway through the presentation. I found a complete audio copy of the presentation from the webmaster jam site, http://www.webjamsession.com/

Given that, I wonder how many people using screen readers attempt to jump around blog posts without reading the accompanying text. While I could see many times that would happen on, say, an e-commerce or informational index site, I wonder if you can get the value of a blog post by just jumping from link to link in the screen reader.

Sighted people have regularly questioned our use of “here” links on this blog, citing the screen reader issue. However, we haven’t heard from anyone who actually uses a screen reader that this practice is an issue, in the context we’re using it.

I wonder what your thoughts are on this topic as it relates to users who interact with Web sites using assistive technology such as a screen reader? The jump to links feature enables them to jump to the linked text to determine whether the link provides an appropriate path to their desired destination … the word “here” (or “click here” or “more details” or “read more”, etc.) hardly provide the context that is needed to make such a decision.

There are many instances in which making a Web site accessible to users with disabilities will have a side benefit of making it even more usable for users who do not rely on assistive technology to use sites. I think this is one of those cases … we’ve seen users scan with their eyes to links to determine if they should follow a particular path - of course sighted users can back up and read the preceding text as context if it is missing from the linked text … but why would we want to make them do that?

When we talk about link length, we talk about both the underlined portion of the link and what we call the associated text, the text that contributes to the meaning of the link.

If the link was just:

here

it would qualify as being too short.

But the link you showed actually has 10 words, falling nicely into the 7-12 range. Our studies have shown the length of the underlined portion, by itself, doesn’t predict success or failure. But the combination of the underlined portion and the associated text does.

You can download the slides for the presentation from here.

The link text is “here”. That’s actually a bit worse than the horrible “click here” that we still see on sites.