Link purpose (link only)
Silktide prompts you to verify that the purpose of each link is clear from its text alone - without reading the surrounding sentence or heading. This is success criterion 2.4.9 (level AAA), the stricter form of 2.4.4 Link Purpose (In Context).
This is a : judging whether link text is clear out of context requires a person. Silktide raises the prompt on each page and a person confirms it.
Why this matters
Screen reader users often pull up a list of all links on a page and jump straight to one. In that list, surrounding context disappears - so "Click here", "Read more", and "Learn more" become meaningless. 2.4.9 requires the link text itself to carry the purpose.
2.4.4 (level A) allows purpose to come from the link plus its programmatic context (the enclosing sentence or list item). 2.4.9 does not.
What to check
- Open a list of links on the page (or read each link's accessible name in isolation).
- For each link, ask: would someone who has not read the surrounding text know where this goes or what it does?
- Ambiguous text ("click here", "more", "details", bare URLs, repeated identical "Read more" links to different pages) fails.
Silktide already automates two related failures under 2.4.4:
- Empty links - links with no accessible name
- Links with different destinations
- the same link text pointing at different URLs
This review covers the remaining judgement call.
How to fix it
- Rewrite link text so it describes the destination or action ("Download the annual report", not "Click here").
- If a visual "Read more" pattern is required, give each link a unique
accessible name (for example with visually hidden text or
aria-label) that includes the article title. - Avoid reusing identical link text for different destinations.
If every link on the page is clear from its text alone, the finding.
How Silktide tests this
Silktide cannot judge link clarity out of context, so this check raises one review prompt per page. The empty-name and identical-text collisions that competitors often map to 2.4.9 are already covered by Silktide's 2.4.4 checks above. No W3C ACT rule covers 2.4.9 as a whole.