Linking to Distraction
Building websites that are accessible to all visitors entails more than just making sure the layout renders well and the text is readable in different browsers; it requires even more than complying with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. Accessibility design is really an attitude about making your site as useful and available as possible.
With the rise of blogs I’ve found that sites are dramatically failing in this regard: linking to other documents or offsite from within the text of a paragraph. Instead of a larger site which may contain a seperate links page many blogs just include links within the post itself.
You may be surprised to hear this. After all one of the foundational tenets of HTML is the ability to markup text with links, well, anywhere in the document. But this can be a huge distraction to people with ADHD or related attention disorders, decreasing the readability of a document and sometimes luring them away before you’ve finished your thought. Just because you can link from anywhere doesn’t mean you should.
After one of my friends with ADHD first brought this to my attention, I looked into the matter more. There are between 8 million and 20 million Americans with ADHD (depending on whose research you subscribe to), a whopping number to be distracted by our indiscriminate linking.
There are easy solutions to this problem. If you have more, please post them as a comment.
- Put links after posts or at the bottom of paragraphs.
- Pull out links into a sidebar or callout.
- Use footnotes. (John Gruber does a nice job of this at Daring Fireball.)
- Design links so they’re less obvious and distracting to the user. (This isn’t really a good solution, because it introduces other usability problems, but it’s a way to help with *this* problem.)
References from this article:
Section 508 of the ADA
Daring Fireball
