There are lots of times when there’s no decent URL available. Perhaps there is some browser plugin that can help Hook in these instances?
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Facebook makes it very hard to get URLs even from its website, but for FB one can sometimes get the URL anyway, and then feed that into Hook.
[I don’t use WhatsApp personally (their track record on privacy and security is so bad, one might as well use twitter)]. Having said that, if they had an API we’d make use of it.
Apple is also very opaque with URLs . Notes and Messages in particular. We know that they have a way of indexing Messages because when you create an event from a Message you can get a linkback to the Message. But I digress.
As I mentioned previously, we will publish a manifesto on hyperlinking based on a paper by myself & Daniel Jomphe, and we hope that will stir things up. That’s been delayed (which I will talk about after a few things get released). But it is coming. And I think it’s fair to say that Hook and this community have already helped bend the macOS universe towards the ideal of link API ubiquity.
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I don’t like this approach of relying on others. I can’t see it happening 
I suggest to just look at what’s on screen and make that usable. The same stuff that’s accessible to screenreaders.
Later on, who knows, add www.textsniper.app image scanning capability if this isn’t already enough.
Then start the hard work of trying to change the world.
If WhatsApp has a copy URL function we will have another look to see if software can use it.
They’ll always be apps that don’t have that.
There’s got to be some accessibility function for blind people that’s designed to handle this that can be leveraged.
Unfortunately not. There will always be apps that do not support linking. Take Messages.app. It does not expose an API for its messages yet.
This is not a unique situation. Suppose one was a video developer and wanted all apps to support the embedding of videos.
The more people talk about linking and share the manifesto the quicker the culture around linking will change.
Having said that, providing links is increasingly common and we vast covered the majority of cases (e.g., by making Finder files linkable).
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I suppose one good ecosystem of apps that do generally support this would be commandline apps which allow piping input and output. I remember noticing that and thinking much the same thing: Why isn’t this possible with GUI apps? If there was a standard then piping input and output on the commandline should be possible.
There are a myiad of apps out there but IMHO the browser should at least work.
If even the browser cannot do such a simple thing then you really got to wonder.
There has to be a document out there from the W3C, Mozilla and visually impaired users out there. Why can’t I even find this? There has to be a better search term to learn about this.
I had assumed you were asking specifically about a WhatsApp app. But you’re asking about WhatsApp in the context of a browser?
I know from (rarely) using Facebook that it deliberately makes it difficult , sometimes impossible to get the specific URL. My guess is that Facebook wants as much control as possible over what content users are exposed to.