Create Links in an Article

Overview

This article covers creating links to other pages external to the article. You can also Make a Table of Contents or Other In-Page Links that are internal to an article.

You can improve the accessibility of articles effectively managing links. When creating links consider the following recommendations.

Adopt

• Link text should be the title of the page being linked to.
  Using meanigful text makes it easy for both directly understanding the destinaton of the link, as well as helping screen readers present intelligible information.
• Keep link text concise
  It's a good strategy to keep the link text to a maxium of 100 characters.
• When linking to downloads (e.g. applications, pdf, word document, etc.)
  • Make sure you indicate when a link activates a download, and it is in the link text.
  • Try to link to the vendors product page containing the download
• Alert the customer when opening new windows
  It is important to warn people when new windows are about to open, especially those with disabilties who may not notice.
• Be careful when using images as links
  There are special requirements for images that are links (refer to W3C H2: Combining adjacent image and text links for the same resource). Generally speaking if there's a text link, and image link that goes to the same page within the same element, then the images alt tag should be left empty.

Avoid

• Do not use "Click here", "More Info", "Read more".
  Screen readers interpret pages in several ways, one of the more common method is to generate a list of links, without context, or tab through the page from link to link, without reading the text in-between.
• Do not use the word "link" in your links.
  Screen readers tell customers when they encouter a link, so there is no reason to be redundent.
• Using URLs as link text
  Most screen readers read the URL letter-by-letter, which becomes unintelligible quickly. See previous recommendation to adopt using the title of linked page as the link.
• Using underline text for anything other links
  When browsing the Web people expect links to be underlined, its also a WCAG2 recommendation . Accordingly it is best to avoid using underline text for non-links whenever possible.

Creating External Links

1. Open the desired KB article.
2. Select/highlight the desired text you want to make a link.
3. Click the Link icon
   
   
    
4. The Link window opens
   
   
    
   • Display Text: Shows the seleted text; this can be changed, and the text in the article will be updated.
   • Link Type: Allows you to select which type of link you want to create. It defaults to URL. Other options are "Link to anchor in the text", and "E-mail".
   • Protocol: Defaults to http://; however, it may change automatically depending upon the value placed in the next field.
   • URL: Paste the desried URL into this field.
5. Click the Target tab.
   
   
    
6. From the Target drop-down menu select the appropriate option:
   
   
    
   • <not set> - the defualt option, use when linking to other pages within the UAA KB system
   • New Window (_blank) - use when linking to pages external to the UAA KB system
   
   Note: the other options displayed are not generally used.
7. Click Ok.