We've discussed about this in the past

Proposed ideas were:

1. Add an aria-label to each element. But this gets repetitive, annoying and time-consuming really quickly.

2. Add a label only to the first 10 or so references and trust ppl 'learn'

3. Make their entire presence toggle-able with a keycombo and apply aria-hidden via JS. But you'd have to explain this at the top of every page for screenreader users only. You could even have multiple settings (hide links and references, hide just references, show all) But that still is a bit of a mess, and requires significant amount of code, you have potential key combo conflicts again, and JS is late loading, so it would take some time to apply...