WCAG 2.4.4 Link Purpose (In Context)

Success Criterion 2.4.4 requires that the purpose of each link can be determined from the link text alone, or from the link text together with its programmatically-determinable context (the surrounding sentence, list item, or table cell it appears in). It's a Level A criterion under Guideline 2.4 (Navigable).

Two failure modes, not one

This criterion actually covers two related but distinct problems:

A link with no accessible name at all — an icon-only link, or an image link with no alt text — announces as bare "link" to a screen reader, with no purpose communicable whatsoever. This is the more severe failure and overlaps with WCAG 4.1.2 (Name, Role, Value). See Empty Links and Buttons.

A link with text, but text that's ambiguous out of context — "click here," "read more," "learn more," repeated identically across many links on the same page. Most screen readers offer a shortcut to browse a page's links as a standalone list, independent of surrounding paragraph text; ten identical "read more" links in that list are indistinguishable from each other, even though each one is technically non-empty.

What "in context" allows

This specific criterion (2.4.4, as opposed to its stricter AAA-level sibling 2.4.9, Link Purpose — Link Only) permits relying on surrounding context to disambiguate a link, not just the link text in isolation. "Read more" is acceptable under 2.4.4 if the sentence or list item it's embedded in makes its destination clear when read together — the bar is "determinable in context," not "determinable purely from the link text with zero surrounding information."

The practical fix

Where possible, make link text itself specific: "Read our Q3 earnings report" beats "Read more." Where a repeated pattern makes that awkward (a card grid where every card ends in "Learn more"), a visually-hidden span extending the accessible name solves it without changing what's shown on screen:

<a href="/blog/q3-earnings">
  Read more<span class="sr-only"> about our Q3 earnings</span>
</a>