How to fix link name on BigCommerce

Steps for BigCommerce

1. Go to BigCommerce Admin → Storefront → My Themes → click 'Edit Theme Files' (or download the theme via 'Download' and edit locally, then re-upload).
2. Common files: templates/components/common/header.html (cart/search icon links), templates/components/common/footer.html (social links), templates/components/products/card.html (product card links).
3. For icon links, add aria-label to the anchor: <a href='{{urls.cart}}' aria-label='View shopping cart'>.
4. For product card image links, add aria-label='View {{product.name}}' to the wrapping <a> around the product image.
5. Save and publish the theme, then test using the WAVE browser extension on your live storefront preview.

What is link name?

Every clickable link on a webpage must have a meaningful text label that screen readers can announce to blind or low-vision users. A "link-name" failure means a link exists on your page but has no readable text — it might be an icon-only button (like a shopping cart or social media icon), an image link with no alt text, or an empty `<a>` tag. The WCAG 2.4.4 criterion ("Link Purpose") requires that the purpose of each link can be determined from the link text alone, or from its immediate surrounding context. Without a name, a screen reader will announce something useless like "link" or read out the raw URL instead of telling the user where the link goes or what it does.

Accessibility failures like this expose your store to legal risk under laws such as the ADA (US), AODA (Canada), EAA (EU), and Equality Act (UK) — lawsuits targeting e-commerce sites for WCAG non-compliance have increased sharply year over year. Beyond legal risk, approximately 7–8 million screen reader users in the US alone cannot navigate or purchase from a store with unnamed links, directly costing you sales. Google's crawlers also use link anchor text as a ranking signal, so unnamed links pass zero topical relevance to the pages they point to, weakening your internal linking SEO. Fixing this is typically a quick-win code change that immediately improves both accessibility compliance and search engine crawlability.

See the complete Link name guide for every platform and the full background.