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Use appropriate link text lengths Usability Guideline

Description

Use link text between 3 and 100 characters so it’s long enough to be understood, but avoids line wrapping.

Help

A single word text link may not give enough information about the link’s destination. A link that is a full sentence is difficult to read quickly, particularly if it wraps to another line.

Applicable standards

Note: The guidelines.usability.gov website has been down since July 2020, although www.usability.gov is still operating and the PDF version of the guidelines is still available.

Change history

  • 6.49 May 2023 Don’t flag clickable Bootstrap cards.
  • 6.48 Mar 2023 Don’t flag short link titles like ‘It’ or ‘Up’.
  • 5.21 Mar 2016 Increased limit to 100 characters.
  • 5.9 Jun 2015 Don’t fire for 2 character words like ‘No’ and ‘pH’ and ‘Io’.
  • 1.0 Feb 2007 Added.

This page describes a web site issue detected in HTML documents by SortSite Desktop and OnDemand Suite.

Rule ID: UseGov10.11