Add aria-label attribute to footnote links

Created on 23 June 2025, 12 days ago

Problem/Motivation

Currently footnote links and backlinks have identical link text and accessible names, but different destinations.

This is a failure of WCAG success criterion 2.4.9, link purpose.

Although footnote links have the title attribute set, this is not sufficient to reliably set the accessible name for the link - see Providing accessible names and descriptions in the ARIA Authoring Practices Guide.

Steps to reproduce

Proposed resolution

Add an aria-label attribute to footnote links with the footnote content.

Remaining tasks

User interface changes

API changes

Data model changes

🐛 Bug report
Status

Active

Version

4.0

Component

Footnotes

Created by

🇬🇧United Kingdom danchamp Angus

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Comments & Activities

  • Issue created by @danchamp
  • 🇬🇧United Kingdom danchamp Angus
  • Pipeline finished with Success
    12 days ago
    Total: 543s
    #529360
  • 🇬🇧United Kingdom scott_euser

    Hmmm I am not sure - is that what a user using a screen reader will want? If they come across a citation, would they want the flow of the text being read to be stopped to read out the reference? Ie, that is what this will do right? Instead of 1 2 3, it will read out the full reference.

    Possibly it could be more desirable to read something like "Citation 1", "Citation 2". Whereas reading out the full reference is maybe better left to if the user decides to set specific focus on the anchor link to not interrupt the reading - then it would be aria-described-by right? Although harder to achieve here as there are multiple ways to output the references.

  • 🇬🇧United Kingdom scott_euser

    I think first probably need more advice/opinions to help decide way forward here before putting more time into an MR

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