Techniques for WCAG 2.0

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H25: Providing a title using the title element

Applicability

HTML 4, XHTML 1.0 and XHTML 1.1

This technique relates to:

Description

All HTML 4, XHTML 1.0 and XHTML 1.1 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 4.01 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.

Tests

Procedure

  1. Examine the source code of the HTML 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