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contentWCAG

Links Without Descriptive Text

MUST

MUST: Link text must describe its destination - avoid generic text like "click here" or "read more". Links should make sense out of context for screen reader link lists.

Links should have descriptive text, not generic phrases like "click here"

Bad

Good

Why it matters

WCAG 2.1 Success Criterion 2.4.4 Link Purpose (In Context), Level A. Screen reader users often navigate by pulling up a list of links, stripped of surrounding prose — "click here" and "read more" tell them nothing. Note: this principle previously carried a Rams badge, but Rams has no descriptive-link-text rule (its only link check is "Missing link destination"), so it is now attributed to the WCAG criterion it actually comes from.

References

Built by Gleb Stroganov, design engineer at Evil Martians.

The rules come from other people's skills and guidelines — Vercel, Rauno Freiberg, @Ibelick, impeccable, Emil Kowalski, Tailwind, RAMS — each one credited on the Sources page. The work here is extraction and wiring: every rule is pulled into one corpus, given a good and a bad example you can operate, a MUST/SHOULD/NEVER rule an agent can paste, and a link back to where it came from.