Accessibility: Have You Ever Encountered Double or Triple Links?

Double links are great for normal users, but if you’re using a screen reader, they’re less fun

Background image by drmakete lab on Unsplash

The Problem With Double Links

Screen-reader users will use the links of a page as their main points of navigation. Providing concise links without double or triple links to the same page will help your users navigate the website.

A normal product listing page will show 50 products. For each product, imagine you have three links going to the product page: one on the title of the product, one on the price, and one on the comments.

If we multiply these three links for 50 products, we get around 150 links our user will have to loop through trying to find the right product. They’ll be constantly bombarded with the same name three times in a row.

Prada has three links for each product

This behavior is developed across many e-commerce websites. As shown here on top with the Prada website, each number is a link you’ll encounter with your screen reader.

The same thing will happen on bigger websites like Amazon, where merging or disabling a few links pointing to the same section of a product page will decrease six identical links.