2.4.4 Link Purpose (In context)
There are general issues with links in the service, they’re not consistently designed and therefore often not very clear in their context. They’re often hard to differentiate from normal text, but though this is an issue it’s not covered by the WCAG-standard.
The link texts by themselves are often not enough to understand their purpose here, but the icons help. But since these icons aren’t communicated to screen reader users the links are very hard to understand for those users.
One solution would be to add words in the link text to make their goal clearer, words like Conversation or Folder could help screen reader users understand their purpose. If the icons would be a part of the text alternative texts on them could be used for the same purpose.
There are other UX-related challenges here as well that should be looked at from a broader perspective.
- Complement links that has an icon with text, it can be visually hidden, that gives the same information as the icon