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Accessible Technology

Titles

Overview

Web pages and documents should have titles that describe their function or purpose. This is used in a variety of ways, and is helpful for all users. For example:

  • The title is typically the first content announced by screen readers when a new page or document is loaded.
  • The title appears in the title bar of the window for some software application.
  • The title appears in the tab in web browsers.
  • The title identifies the page or document when it is added to favorites or bookmarks.
  • The title identifies the page in search results.

Given its importance, content authors should assign titles to their web pages or documents that are meaningful and easy to read, given all of the above use cases. See the links below for specific techniques.

Techniques

Techniques

In HTML, the page title is contained within the <title> element. This should not be confused with the main heading of the web page, which should be tagged as <h1> (for more about headings, see our Headings page). The main heading is visible within the body of the web page, and the title is not. However, the title is used for other important purposes, as listed at the top of this page.

A good title on a web page communicates the topic or purpose of the current page. When the page is part of a related collection of web pages (e.g., a departmental website) the page title should be combined with the site title, with the page title first. For example, the title of the current page is “Titles” and the title of the website is “Accessible Technology.” Therefore, the HTML title should be, and is, “Titles | Accessible Technology,” coded as follows:

<title>Titles | Accessible Technology</title>

Content management systems such as WordPress or Drupal automatically generate the <title> element from the page name. They typically follow the best practice described above in the HTML section, and combine the page name and site name and add them to the <title> element.

To add a title in a Microsoft Word or PowerPoint file, select the File menu, then select “Properties…,” this will display the properties window. Clicking on the summary tab will reveal the Title field. Enter a title that is meaningful and communicates the overall topic of the document.
Properties window of Microsoft Office, Summary tab is selected and Title field has focus

To add a title to a document in Google Docs, use the field located in the upper left corner of the document window. By default, new documents are assigned the title “Untitled document”.
Close up of Google Document Title field

InDesign requires a document title for accessibility. To add a document title in InDesign, select the File menu, then select “File Info…”. This will open up the “File Information” dialog. Enter a meaningful title into the “Document Title” field at the top of this dialog. When the InDesign file is exported to PDF, this information will be transferred appropriately to the PDF.

InDesign file information dialogue box with the document title filed circled

To change the document title of a PDF, you must use Adobe Acrobat Pro in order to access and edit the metadata. After opening the PDF, select the File menu, then and select “Properties…” This will display the “Document Properties” dialog. On the Description tab,  enter the document title into the Title field. Depending on the authoring tool that was used to create the document content, this field may already be populated with title defined within the original source document.
Document Properties window of a PDF, Description tab, showing the Title field

WCAG 2.1 success criteria

The issues described on this page, and associated Techniques pages, map to the following success criteria in the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1: