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by rerdavies 345 days ago
Their recommendation is very different.

W3c says:

    Get *Amaya*
    Read more about *Amaya*
The home office says:

    *Get Amaya*
    *Read more about Amaya*
which seems much more sensible, but suffers from a different problem when used in context.

Personally, I think both are confounding two different use cases. Links are often used inline in text. The use case that W3c and the Home Office are addressing are use cases that would be better address by out-of-line buttons:

    [Download]
    [Documentation]
But both seem broken when the use case is hyperlinks in inline text.

To use a concrete example, how should one rewrite the following?

    PiPedal is a guitar effects pedal that runs 
    on Raspberry Pi. To download PiPedal, *click here*.
    To read the documentation, *click here*. 
I get the objection. But the fix seems unacceptable:

    PiPedal is a guitar effects pedal that runs 
    on Raspberry Pi. Get Pipedal. Read the documentation.
Nuh uh. Not happening. I'm not sure what you would call that. Meta-grammatically incorrect? Whatever it is, it is not idiomatic English.

   Pipedal is a guitar effects pedal that runs on
   Raspberry Pi. To download PiPedal, visit the *Download
   Page*. To learn more about Pipedal, view the
   *Documentation*.
Perhaps. That is the actual text I used in my documentation. But, speaking from personal experience, the challenge is that it is often very difficult to nounify "click here"

   Ubuntu Server installs don't suffer from this problem;
   but before choosing an Ubuntu Server install, you
   should read the *Ubuntu Server* section of the 
   "Installing on Ubuntu" page. 
Which makes one wonder, what exactly is the foul that's being committed when "here" is used as a pronoun for the content that's being referenced? In this use case, there is not an actual accessibility issue, because the the link sits inline within a sentence that provides all the context that's necessary to indicate what to expect when you click.

And in the very first example given, the text is from a lede in a web page where concision matters.

   To download PiPedal, click *here*.
Is that really an accessibility issue? particularly when there's are buttons right above it that say

    [ Download ] [ Documentation ]
The actual metric that counts here is: how many times will people visit the Download page? And from that perspective there is significant doubt in my mind as to whether the following text will be better.

  To download PiPedal, visit the *Download Page*.
5 comments

    PiPedal is a guitar effects pedal that runs 
    on Raspberry Pi.
    You can *download PiPedal*, and learn more
    in the *PiPedal documentation*.
I can't believe you verbified "noun".
> ...accessibility issue? particularly when there's are buttons right above it that say...

Yes, those buttons may not be "in context" when the page is not being viewed in a visual medium.

> To download PiPedal, click here.

Another appropriate link in this case could be simply:

  *Download PiPedal* now!
Or like your last example, just link it slightly differently to emphasize the action:

  To *download PiPedal*, visit the Download Page.

    PiPedal is a guitar effects pedal that runs on 
    Raspberry Pi.
    *Download PiPedal* now (MIT license) 
    or read all about it in the *PiPedal documentation*.
edited in an attempt to fix my bad formatting (4x and I'm not doing it anymore no matter if I finally got it right or not)

    PiPedal is a guitar effects pedal that runs on Raspberry Pi. *To download PiPedal, click here*.
    *To read the documentation, click here*.