What determines if a link is visited?

Question

I'm having an issue while testing our webapp for accessibility that despite being seemingly very simple, I haven't been able to find a clear answer for on Google.

The issue is that the screen reader (specifically Voice Over in iOS and OSX Safari) reads every internal link in the app as "Visited Link" even before the user has clicked any of them. The links all have the same base (something like http://domain.com/path/index.html#what-the-link-does), so my first instinct is that since these links all point to different hashes on the same file the links are being views as visited because that file has been visited.

However, that's not the desired behavior. We'd like all the links to just be referred to as just "Link" instead. So here are my questions:

1. What determines whether the link is considered visited? Will just visiting the domain cause it? Will visiting a specific file cause it? Or should different hashes of the same file have different visited statuses?

2. Is there any way to control this behavior and prevent the links from being read as visited? Some Aria parameter maybe?

Answer 1

I may have misunderstood the question, but if your links are on index.html in your example, can you not replace

http://domain.com/path/index.html#what-the-link-does

with simply

#what-the-link-does

The visited logic is probably only looking at the URI without query string / anchor tags being taken into account