PDF link descriptions
Silktide checks that the links and other interactive elements in a PDF describe themselves. A link in a PDF is an invisible clickable area placed over the page, and unless the document connects it to a description, software reading the document has nothing to announce.
Those clickable areas are , and they include links, form fields, comments, and stamps. This check reports the ones with no description of their own.
Why this matters
users often move through a document link by link, in the same way sighted readers scan a page for something clickable. Doing that produces a list of links out of context, so each one has to make sense alone. A link that announces nothing appears in that list as "link", and a reader has no way to tell where it goes without abandoning the list and hunting for the surrounding text.
The visible text is not automatically available to the annotation. A sighted reader sees "read the full guidance" and an underline in the same place and treats them as one thing; in the file they are two separate objects, and joining them up is something the document has to state. When it does not, the link is announced as blank, or as the raw web address, which is why readers sometimes recite forty characters of URL.
This gets worse in documents where the same phrase repeats. Twelve links reading "click here" tell a reader nothing twelve times, and the pattern is common in PDFs converted from print, where the address was printed in full and the link added later.
How to fix it
- Write link text that describes the destination, and let the description follow from it. "Read the 2025 annual report" works in a list of links; "click here" and "more" do not.
- Insert links with your authoring tool's hyperlink feature rather than drawing link areas onto a finished PDF. Word and InDesign both connect the link to its text when they export, which is what makes the description available.
- Add a description in Acrobat Pro where you must repair an existing file: select the link or annotation and give it a description through its properties.
- Describe form fields as well. A field has no visible text to borrow, so its label has to be attached to it explicitly. See Interactive forms.
- Or run Silktide remediation, which joins links to their text and reviews whether each one's purpose is clear. See Links in documents.
How Silktide tests this
- Find the PDF documents linked from your website, and analyse each unique file once, however many pages link to it.
- Find the annotations on each page: links, form fields, and other interactive elements.
- Report the document when an annotation has no alternate description.
- Report each document once, however many annotations are affected.
Whether a link's description actually explains where it goes is judged separately during AI review. Whether the links work at all is Broken links, which tests links inside PDF documents as well as on pages.
Troubleshooting
The link text next to it is perfectly clear
For a sighted reader, yes. The description is what makes that text available to the annotation, and without it the clickable area is announced on its own. Where the visible text is already good, the description can simply match it.
The web address is printed in the document
That helps someone reading on paper and does not help a screen reader, which will read the address out character group by character group. Keep the printed address if your readers need it, and still give the link a description.
These are form fields, not links
Form fields are annotations too, and they need descriptions for a stronger reason: there is no text on the page for a reader to fall back on. An undescribed field is announced as an empty edit box.
The annotation is decorative
Decoration should not be an annotation. If a stamp or shape is not interactive and carries no meaning, it belongs in the page content marked as decoration. See PDF content tagging.