- 🇳🇱Netherlands bskibinski Breda, The Netherlands
Because of a recent accessibility audit, I see this new functionality for extlink.
I would advise rolling this change back, but that could be difficult now without breaking existing sites.
The problem of rendering the icon/text outside of the link, is that screen readers (accessibility) won't read this text, because it's placed outside of the link, and isn't referenced by any aria-describedby labels.
IMHO I think a better solution would be to just override the underline on the icon with CSS, instead of this solution.
We do want to make an improvement, that decouples the icon from the 'screen-reader' text, and than this option would be viable again. But for now, I would not recommend using the new before/after placements.