The best practice is to use sans-serif fonts rather than serif or decorative fonts. Sans serif does not have decorative lines. The fonts include Arial, Calibri, Century Gothic, Tahoma, and Verdana. The font size should be 12 pt.—font for the body text. The font could be larger depending on the audience or page layout.
Apply These Guidelines to Create Usable Text Links
Each link must have meaningful text describing its purpose without relying on the surrounding text. While it is important to be descriptive, keeping links as concise as possible is also important.
The screen reader will tell the user that they have encountered a link so, there is no reason to put it in the meaningful text that it is a link. The screen reader will read it as “Link Read more on making Word documents accessible.” Also, avoid putting the same link close together for some screen reader users. It can get confusing.
Many screen readers, including JAWS and VoiceOver, give users the option to read the Web page links as demonstrated in the image below listing links from this page. As the list shows, link text which is meaningful out of context is more usable in a list.
Unclear examples of meaningful links would be:
- Click here for how to add alt. text to the image
- More info about makes your work accessible
- Read more on how Word documents are accessible
Usable examples of meaningful links would be:
How to Create Hypertext
Type your words you will use for your meaningful link. You can also use an image to become a hyperlink.
Highlight the words/image and select “Insert” then select “Links” finally select “Link.”
Paste the website into the “Address:” box from the pop-up window.
Select the “Ok” button for the link to be added.
The default color of a hyperlink is usually blue. Text links are underlined and have a different color value (lighter or darker) than the main text. This provision will help colorblind users find links more efficiently and improve usability practice.
Helpful Resources
Select the link below to view additional resources: