HTML page title is descriptive

Rule Type:
atomic
Rule ID:
c4a8a4
Last Modified:
June 3, 2021
Accessibility Requirements Mapping:
2.4.2 Page Titled (Level A)
  • Required for conformance to WCAG 2.0 and later on level A and higher
  • Outcome mapping:
    • Any failed outcomes: success criterion is not satisfied
    • All passed outcomes: success criterion is satisfied
    • An inapplicable outcome: success criterion needs further testing
G88: Providing descriptive titles for Web pages
  • Not required to conformance to any W3C accessibility recommendation.
  • Outcome mapping:
    • Any failed outcomes: technique is not satisfied
    • All passed outcomes: technique needs further testing
    • An inapplicable outcome: technique needs further testing
H25: Providing a title using the title element
  • Not required to conformance to any W3C accessibility recommendation.
  • Outcome mapping:
    • Any failed outcomes: technique is not satisfied
    • All passed outcomes: technique needs further testing
    • An inapplicable outcome: technique needs further testing
Input Aspects:
DOM Tree
Language

Description

This rule checks that the first title in an HTML page describes the topic or purpose of that page.

Applicability

This rule applies to the first HTML title element that

Expectation

The target element describes the topic or purpose of the overall content of the document.

Assumptions

This rule assumes that the language of each test target can be correctly determined (either programmatically or by analyzing the content), and sufficiently understood.

Accessibility Support

Background

The title elements of embedded documents, such as those in iframe, object, or svg elements, are not applicable because those are not web pages according to the definition in WCAG.

The HTML specification - The title element requires that a document only has one title element, and that it is a child of the head element of a document. However, current HTML specification also describes what should happen in case of multiple titles, and titles outside the head element. Because of this, neither of these validation issues causes a conformance problem for WCAG.

Test Cases

Passed

Passed Example 1

This <title> element describes the content of the document.

<html lang="en">
	<head>
		<title>Clementine harvesting season</title>
	</head>
	<body>
		<p>
			Clementines will be ready to harvest from late October through February.
		</p>
	</body>
</html>

Passed Example 2

This <title> element, the first of two, describes the content of the document.

<html lang="en">
	<head>
		<title>Clementine harvesting season</title>
		<title>Second title is ignored</title>
	</head>
	<body>
		<p>
			Clementines will be ready to harvest from late October through February.
		</p>
	</body>
</html>

Passed Example 3

This <title> element, which is within the body, describes the content of the document. Even though it is not placed within the <head> element, as expected according to the HTML specification, the rule still passes because the browser fixes it and it doesn’t cause any known accessibility issues.

<html lang="en">
	<head> </head>
	<body>
		<title>Clementine harvesting season</title>
		<p>
			Clementines will be ready to harvest from late October through February.
		</p>
	</body>
</html>

Failed

Failed Example 1

This <title> element does not describe the content of the document.

<html lang="en">
	<head>
		<title>Apple harvesting season</title>
	</head>
	<body>
		<p>
			Clementines will be ready to harvest from late October through February.
		</p>
	</body>
</html>

Failed Example 2

This <title> element, the first of two, does not describe the content of the document. Most browsers, and this rule, only look at the first <title> element.

<html lang="en">
	<head>
		<title>First title is incorrect</title>
		<title>Clementine harvesting season</title>
	</head>
	<body>
		<p>
			Clementines will be ready to harvest from late October through February.
		</p>
	</body>
</html>

Inapplicable

Inapplicable Example 1

This title element is a child of an svg element.

<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
  <title>This is a circle</title>
  <circle cx="150" cy="75" r="50" fill="green"></circle>
</svg>

Glossary

Outcome

An outcome is a conclusion that comes from evaluating an ACT Rule on a test subject or one of its constituent test target. An outcome can be one of the three following types:

Note: A rule has one passed or failed outcome for every test target. When there are no test targets the rule has one inapplicable outcome. This means that each test subject will have one or more outcomes.

Note: Implementations using the EARL10-Schema can express the outcome with the outcome property. In addition to passed, failed and inapplicable, EARL 1.0 also defined an incomplete outcome. While this cannot be the outcome of an ACT Rule when applied in its entirety, it often happens that rules are only partially evaluated. For example, when applicability was automated, but the expectations have to be evaluated manually. Such “interim” results can be expressed with the incomplete outcome.

Whitespace

Whitespace are characters that have the Unicode “White_Space” property in the Unicode properties list.

This includes:

Acknowledgements

This rule was written in the ACT Rules community group, with the support of the EU-funded WAI-Tools Project.

Authors

Changelog

This is the first version of this ACT rule.

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