Do not ship page titles that identify nothing
Untitled Document, New Page 1, report.html. F25 is the documented failure for titles that exist and identify nothing, and it is the only failure the page titled rule has. A title that is missing is a different thing. Four categories are named. The first is authoring tool defaults, five of which are named as exact strings. The second is filenames that describe nothing in their own right, like report.html, which is what document conversion pipelines produce at scale. The third is empty text. The fourth is filler left behind in a template. Two more shapes fail on the rule's own terms without appearing in the technique. A bare domain name, and the same string repeated across a site, because a title identical on every page cannot identify each page's contents.
How we find it in an audit
Automated checks handle most of this well. Empty titles, duplicate titles across a crawl, and the known default strings are all facts a machine can settle, and we run them over the whole site rather than a sample. Then a reviewer reads the survivors, because Page 4 passes every automated test there is and identifies nothing. The question is whether the title would tell somebody with twelve tabs open what this one is.
How affected users experience it
The title is the first thing a screen reader announces on load, before any content, which makes it the sentence that tells a user whether they arrived where they meant to. Untitled Document tells them nothing, so they have to start reading to find out. With several tabs open it gets worse, because the tab list is a list of titles, and switching between four pages called Home is guesswork. For someone with a cognitive disability, a title that names the page is what makes it possible to leave and come back.
Passes vs. fails
Passes
<title>Order history | Acme Store</title>Fails
<title>Untitled Document</title>How this gets tested
The W3C publishes test rules that define what a checker looks for here.
- HTML page has non-empty titleA tool can check this
- HTML page title is descriptiveA tool can check this
The other techniques filed under this rule
5 guides on this site are filed under 2.4.2 Page Titled. W3C documents this one as a failure of that rule, so it describes a way the rule gets broken rather than a way to pass it.
This guide is our interpretation of W3C technique F25: Failure of Success Criterion 2.4.2 due to the title of a web page not identifying the contents. W3C publishes its techniques as guidance rather than as the standard, and says so on every one of them. The success criterion is what conformance is measured against, and a technique is one documented way to meet it.