Providing a title using the title element

Important Information about Techniques and ACT Rules

See Understanding Techniques for WCAG Success Criteria and Understanding ACT Rules for WCAG Success Criteria for important information about the usage of these informative techniques and rules, and how they relate to the normative WCAG 2.1 success criteria. The Applicability section explains the scope of the technique, and the presence of techniques for a specific technology does not imply that the technology can be used in all situations to create content that meets WCAG 2.1.

Applicability

HTML and XHTML

This technique relates to Success Criterion 2.4.2: Page Titled (Sufficient as a way to meet G88: Providing descriptive titles for Web pages).

Description

All HTML and XHTML documents, including those in individual frames in a frameset, have a title element in the head section that defines in a simple phrase the purpose of the document. This helps users to orient themselves within the site quickly without having to search for orientation information in the body of the page.

Note that the (mandatory) title element, which only appears once in a document, is different from the title attribute, which may be applied to almost every HTML and XHTML element.

Examples

Example 1

This example defines a document's title.

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">   
   <head>     
      <title>The World Wide Web Consortium</title>     
   </head>   
   <body>     
      ...   
   </body> 
</html>

Resources

Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement implied.

Related ACT Rules

Tests

Procedure

  1. Examine the source code of the HTML or XHTML document and check that a non-empty title element appears in the head section.
  2. Check that the title element describes the document.

Expected Results

  • Checks 1 and 2 are true.