Goal
- Prevent users from only having a hard-to-understand URL as a label.
- Avoid links that become invisible when CSS styles or background images are not handled.
- Improve the accessibility of content for people with disabilities.
Implementation
Give each link a text label (between the opening and closing tags of element a) or, if necessary, via the text alternative of an img or object element, etc.
Do not prevent the display of the text caption of element a by replacing it with a CSS style effect (background image).
Find out more:
Control
Detection of empty links requires the generated code to be examined in order to check the content actually present in the a tag, in the alternative img tag in case of an image-link or in the alternative object and embed elements, etc.
In each page checked:
- Check that each text link has a label displayed when CSS styles are disabled.
- Check that each image link has a label displayed when images are disabled;
In the case of HTML links, also verify that the label is displayed when only the colours are deactivated.
Overview and background
The 240 Opquast rules are defined and agreed upon by an extensive community of web professionals and academics. These web quality assurance guidance rules started as a list of best practices 20 years ago. They have since been revised every five years and have been tried and tested via millions of web interactions by Opquast community’s customers, including the leading CMS communities which have developed plugins for WordPress, Drupal and Prestashop. The most recent version, v4, was established in 2020.
Each rule has individual technical sheets and the rules can be searched by project phase or various topics: e-commerce, data-privacy, internationalization, security, code, etc, or by themes: accessibility, SEO, mobile, privacy, and ecodesign. The complete checklist is available on a creative commons license BY-SA.
To learn more about the Opquast approach, read this article published at Smashing Magazine
Broad application and benefits
The rules should be applied to your projects from the design phase through to post-implementation , and they should be understood by all professionals with web and customer experience (CX) responsibilities: from strategy to operations, marketers to project managers, and editorial to technical staff. The benefits of using this ruleset are numerous, including improving customer satisfaction, web performance, and e-commerce, and expanding your client base, while also decreasing your errors and costs.
Discover Opquast training and certification
The objective of these rules and the Opquast community mission is ‘making the web better’ for your customers and for everyone! Opquast rules cover the key major areas of risk that can negatively affect website users such as privacy, ecodesign, accessibility and security.
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