One option for making the links in your works-cited-list more accessible for users of screen readers is to hyperlink the source’s title or description to the URL you would include at the end of your entry in the Location element. Then do not list the URL in that Location element.
Normandin, Shawn. “Symbol, Allegory, and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.” Studies in Philology, vol. 116, no. 3, summer 2019, pp. 589–616. JSTOR.
Southam, Brian C. “Jane Austen: English Novelist.” Britannica, 13 Oct. 2024.
Hyperlinking that text makes the entry more accessible, because people who use screen readers may choose to navigate a web page by tabbing through all the links present on the page or to listen to a list of all the links on a page, rather than having the screen reader read out the entire web page. For people navigating from link to link on a page or listening to a list of links, descriptive hyperlinked text may be more useful than the URL itself or a general phrase like “click here” because a description tells where each link leads, even without the full text on the page.
When you hyperlink the source’s title or description, watch out for entries with identical titles or descriptions. Links to different pages need to have unique text: two links with the same text would give the impression to people tabbing through the links or listening to all the links that those links lead to the same source. So if your work has sources with identical titles or descriptions, also include the Author element or, if the entry doesn’t have an Author element or the authors are identical too, the element that follows the Title of Source element in your hyperlink as well to differentiate them.
“William Shakespeare.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 20 Dec. 2024.
Note that this method is intended for when your works-cited list will only be available digitally. If your work will be printed, you’ll need to add the URLs into the Location elements of your entries so that readers of the printed document can access the hyperlinks.