Why "Click Here" and "Read More" Links Fail Accessibility (and Hurt SEO)

Of all the accessibility problems hiding on a typical small-business website, this one is the most common, the easiest to spot, and the cheapest to fix. You do not need a developer. You do not need to touch any code. You just need to stop writing links that say “click here,” “read more,” “learn more,” and “here.”

It sounds trivial. It is not. Vague link text is a Level A failure under the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines — the most basic, non-negotiable tier of accessibility — and it quietly breaks the experience for a large group of people every single day. The good news is that fixing it is mostly a writing habit, which means anyone who edits the words on your website can do it this afternoon.

To understand why “click here” is a problem, you have to understand how a blind or low-vision visitor moves through a web page. They are not reading top to bottom the way you do. That would be painfully slow. Instead, screen reader software lets them pull up a list of every link on the page, all at once, and jump straight to the one they want.

In NVDA (a free, widely used screen reader on Windows), the shortcut is Insert + F7, which opens an “Elements List” of links. JAWS has the same feature. On a Mac, VoiceOver users open the “rotor” and flick to the links view. The result is the same everywhere: a clean, stripped-down list of link text with no surrounding paragraphs, no headings, no context. Just the words inside each link.

Now imagine that list on a page where every link says the same thing:

  • read more
  • read more
  • click here
  • read more
  • learn more
  • here

That list is useless. The visitor has no idea where any of those links go. The whole point of the feature — skim the links, pick the destination — collapses. They are forced to go back and hunt through the full page, reading the text before and after each link to guess at its purpose. You have taken a thirty-second task and turned it into a five-minute slog.

Compare that to a page with descriptive links:

  • read our refund policy
  • download the spring catalogue
  • book a consultation
  • see pricing for the Pro plan

Even with zero surrounding context, every destination is obvious. That is the entire goal.

This is the law, not a nicety

People sometimes assume descriptive link text is a “nice to have” — a polish item for accessibility perfectionists. It is not. It is WCAG Success Criterion 2.4.4, Link Purpose (In Context), and it is rated Level A.

WCAG has three conformance levels: A, AA, and AAA. Level A is the floor — the bare minimum, the things that cause the most fundamental barriers. Most accessibility laws around the world point at WCAG Level AA, which includes everything in Level A. That means link purpose is not an advanced requirement you work toward later; it is part of the baseline you are expected to meet first.

This matters legally because the standards that regulators actually enforce are built on WCAG. The European Accessibility Act, which began applying in June 2025, requires conformance with the EN 301 549 standard, which in turn adopts WCAG. In the United States, ADA website lawsuits are routinely settled against the WCAG 2.1 AA benchmark. A site littered with “click here” links is failing a Level A criterion — one of the easiest possible things to get right — which is exactly the kind of detail that shows up in an audit, a demand letter, or an accessibility complaint.

Who else this affects (it is not just screen readers)

Descriptive links help a much wider audience than people often realise.

Voice control users. Someone who navigates by speaking commands — because of a motor disability, an injury, or just preference — activates a link by saying its name: “click book a consultation.” If five links all say “read more,” the software cannot tell which one they mean, and they are stuck disambiguating with numbers and guesswork.

People with cognitive or attention differences. Clear, specific link text reduces the mental effort of figuring out what a page offers. “Download the 2026 price list” tells you what will happen. “Click here” makes you stop and work it out.

Sighted visitors who skim. Almost nobody reads a web page word for word. People scan, and links — usually coloured and underlined — catch the eye first. Descriptive link text lets a busy, fully sighted customer find what they want faster too. This is the rare accessibility fix that improves the experience for literally everyone.

Search engines. More on this below, because it is a genuinely useful bonus.

The five worst offenders

When you go looking on your own site, these are the patterns you will find most often:

  1. “Click here.” The classic. It also assumes everyone is clicking — many people are tapping, or using a keyboard, or a switch device. Nobody is literally “clicking here.”
  2. “Read more” / “Learn more.” Extremely common at the bottom of blog cards, service summaries, and product teasers, where the same phrase repeats a dozen times down the page.
  3. “Here.” As in “to see our menu, click here.” The meaningful words (“our menu”) are sitting right next to the link but are not part of it.
  4. A raw URL. A link whose text is www.example.com/services/2026/q2-report-final.pdf. A screen reader may read that character by character, slash by slash. It is miserable to listen to.
  5. “Download” or “PDF” alone. Download what? A button that just says “Download,” repeated next to several different files, leaves everyone guessing.

The SEO bonus

Here is the part that gets business owners to actually do this: the same fix that helps disabled visitors also helps your search ranking.

Search engines use link text — “anchor text” — as a signal about what the linked page is about. When every internal link on your site says “click here,” you are wasting that signal entirely. When your links say “spring gardening guide” or “emergency plumbing services,” you are telling Google exactly what those pages cover, in the user’s own language. Descriptive anchor text is a long-standing, uncontroversial SEO recommendation.

So this is not accessibility versus marketing. It is one change that serves both. The words that help a blind visitor find your refund policy are the same words that help Google understand it.

How to fix it — no code required

The fix is almost always just rewriting the visible text of the link. The principle: the link text should make sense on its own, lifted out of the sentence around it.

Move the descriptive words into the link. Take the meaningful part of the sentence and make that the link.

  • Before: To read about our process, click [here].
  • After: Read about [our process].

Front-load the unique words. If you have a row of similar items (blog posts, services, products), do not end each one with an identical “Read more.” Either link the item’s title directly, or include the specific name:

  • Before: [Read more] (under every blog card)
  • After: [Read: How to choose an accessible website template]

Make whole titles into links. On a blog index or product grid, the cleanest pattern is to make each item’s heading the link. The heading is already unique and descriptive, so it doubles as perfect link text.

Spell out files and formats. Instead of a lonely “Download,” write “Download the 2026 price list (PDF, 400 KB).” That tells everyone what they are getting, what format it is in, and roughly how big it is.

When you truly cannot change the visible text

Sometimes a design genuinely needs a short, repeating label — think “Read more” buttons in a tightly designed card layout — and the marketing team will not budge on the visible words. There is a fallback, and this is the one place you may need a hand from whoever maintains your site: a hidden label that only assistive technology reads.

There are two common techniques. One is a aria-label on the link, for example aria-label="Read more about our refund policy", which replaces what a screen reader announces while leaving the visible “Read more” alone. The other is “visually hidden” text — extra words placed inside the link but hidden off-screen with CSS so sighted users do not see them but screen readers still read them.

Treat these as a last resort, not a first move. They add complexity, they can get out of sync with the visible text over time, and they only help screen reader users — they do nothing for sighted skimmers or for SEO. Rewriting the visible text is almost always the better answer, because it helps everyone at once.

A note on “in context”

You may hear that the WCAG criterion is technically satisfied if the link’s purpose can be determined from its surrounding context — the sentence, the list item, the table cell, or the heading it sits under. That is true: a row of “Read more” links, each directly beneath a distinct, descriptive heading, can pass the letter of Level A because the heading provides the context.

But “technically passes” and “actually works well” are different things. Remember the links list: when a screen reader user pulls up every link on the page in one view, that surrounding context is gone. Relying on context is fragile. The robust, future-proof move is to make the link text descriptive on its own. If it stands alone, it passes everywhere, every way someone might encounter it.

You do not need special software to audit this. Pick your busiest pages — the homepage, your main service or product pages, your blog index — and do this:

  • Read only the links. Scan down the page and read each linked phrase by itself, ignoring everything around it. Any link where you cannot tell the destination is a problem.
  • Hunt for repeats. Use your browser’s find function (Ctrl/Cmd + F) and search for “click here,” “read more,” “learn more,” and “here.” Every match is a candidate to rewrite.
  • Try a free checker. Browser tools like WAVE or axe DevTools flag generic and empty link text automatically and will point you straight at the offenders.

Then fix them in your CMS or page editor the same way you would fix any typo. No deployment, no developer ticket — just better words.

The quick checklist

  • Every link makes sense read on its own, with no surrounding text.
  • No “click here,” “read more,” “learn more,” or bare “here.”
  • Repeated link labels (like “Read more” on cards) are replaced with specific titles, or the title itself is the link.
  • File downloads name the file and its format.
  • Raw URLs are replaced with human-readable text.
  • If a repeating label must stay visible, a hidden, descriptive label has been added — as a last resort.

This is one of the few accessibility wins that costs nothing, needs no technical skill, helps disabled and non-disabled visitors alike, and quietly improves your SEO at the same time. There is no reason to put it off.

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