WCAG 2.4.4
Link Purpose (In Context)
34%
of the 609 sites we scanned fail this
Ranging from 13.3% of US local government to 51.4% of US healthcare providers. Pooled across five targeted cohorts, so treat it as a convenience sample rather than a rate for the web.
What it means and how to fix it
What 2.4.4 covers
- We detect this: Links with no accessible name at all
- No engine can detect this: Links reading "read more", "click here" or "learn more"The criterion allows the surrounding context to supply the purpose, so these are not automatically failures. Deciding whether the context does enough is exactly the judgement no engine can make, and it is the most common real failure of this criterion.
- No engine can detect this: Several links with identical text pointing to different destinations
- Partly detected: Image links whose purpose rests on the image's alt textA missing alt on a linked image is detected. Whether the alt describes the link's destination is not.
Of that, one failure is detectable automatically, and these are what the rates on this page measure. Each needs its own fix. The percentage is the share of all 609 scanned sites affected. These do not sum to the 34% above: a site can fail more than one of them, and most that fail any fail several.
- Some links don't say where they go34%
Screen reader users cannot determine the destination or purpose of links without accessible names.
What it looks like in code
HTML<a href="/path">
<svg viewBox="0 0 71 48" width="71" height="48" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">...</svg>
</a><a href="/pricing">See pricing</a>
<!-- Icon-only link -->
<a href="/cart" aria-label="Basket, 3 items">
<svg aria-hidden="true" focusable="false">...</svg>
</a>A link with no discernible text is announced as "link" and nothing else, which is unusable in a links list.
Shown for Some links don't say where they go. The failing example is real markup from a site in our research cohorts. Class, style and data attributes are removed, and ... marks a value we elided. The structure is unchanged, because the structure is the failure.
For what the criterion formally requires, read the W3C Understanding document.
How often it fails
Share of scanned sites in each cohort. These are five targeted studies, not a random sample of the web, so read the contrast between cohorts rather than any one figure as a web-wide rate.
Who fails it most3 cuts by state, sector, country
By state
By sector
By country
Groups smaller than 8 sites are not shown: a rate over a handful of sites moves by tens of points on a single result.
What the numbers do not say
The cleanest result here is a negative one: 0 of 14 EU travel and ticketing sites have a link with no accessible name, against 6 of 12 grocers. Booking flows are heavily tested because a broken link costs a sale directly, and that testing catches this criterion as a side effect.
What this does not measureLimits of these figures, and where the corpus came from
- These are five targeted cohorts, not a random sample of the web. Per-cohort rates are the figure to quote; the pooled rate is a convenience sample.
- Denominators count sites that produced a result. Sites that were blocked or errored are excluded rather than counted as passing.
- Occurrence counts are floors: the engine records at most 25 occurrences of a rule per page.
- The EU and Indian cohorts retained only the primary success criterion per finding, so a rule mapping to several criteria contributes to one of them in those two cohorts and to all of them in the other three.
| Cohort | Scanned | Attempted |
|---|---|---|
| Shopify DTC stores | 75 | 75 |
| US local government | 158 | 221 |
| US healthcare providers | 208 | 218 |
| EU e-commerce | 107 | 170 |
| Indian financial services | 61 | 72 |
Corpus generated 2026-09-18.
Check your own site
A free scan reports WCAG 2.4.4 alongside everything else, with the exact elements that fail.
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