A reputable search engine informs me that there are about 1,320,000,000 results when I search for the phrase “click here”. I confess to being astounded. I had been gently chiding a friend who had let this challenge to accessibility creep into his website. It turns out he is not alone.
As far back as 1999 the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 urged web content developers to avoid the use of “click here”:
Guideline 13. Provide clear navigation mechanisms.
- 13.1 Clearly identify the target of each link. [Priority 2]
- Link text should be meaningful enough to make sense when read out of context — either on its own or as part of a sequence of links. Link text should also be terse. For example, in HTML, write “Information about version 4.3” instead of “click here”. In addition to clear link text, content developers may further clarify the target of a link with an informative link title (e.g., in HTML, the “title” attribute).
It’s a little thing. Yet for me it is something that leaps out when I see it.
So why are there more than a billion instances of “click here” out there in the wild? I don’t know. But I think that friends don’t let friends introduce further instances.
fascinating.
I don’t think I’ve ever used ‘click here’ to indicate links. I have sometimes just used ‘here’ but I find it stylistically clumsy.
I guess 1.3 billion uses makes it a bit cliched now.