H33Sufficient technique WCAG 2.4.4 WCAG 2.4.9 Level A Partly scanner-detectable

Supplement vague link text with a title attribute

A title attribute on a link can carry the words the link text is missing, and W3C does list that as sufficient for 2.4.4 Link Purpose when the title supplements a description that already partly exists. Then it says, on the same page, that you should probably use something else, because support for the title attribute is thin and the words often never reach anybody. There is also a hard line inside the technique. Anything a person needs to know before they follow the link, a warning, a file type, a file size, a new window, belongs in the link text, because a tooltip arrives too late to change a decision. Hidden link text, positioned off-screen and read aloud like any other text, does the same job with none of the fragility. That is technique C7, and it is the one W3C names as preferred.

How we find it in an audit

Scanners hand us the inventory. Read more, click here, bare URLs, and titles that repeat the link text word for word. Then a person decides whether the title adds the missing purpose or only adds a tooltip nobody sees, and in almost every case the recommendation we write is to move those words into the link itself.

How affected users experience it

Screen reader users pull up a list of every link on the page and choose from it, which strips each link down to its own words. A list reading Read more, Read more, Read more is useless, and the title meant to rescue it is frequently never announced. Keyboard users and phone users have nothing to hover with, so for them the tooltip does not exist at all.

Passes vs. fails

Passes: each page names itself. Fails: identical, meaningless titles.

Passes

<a href="/report.pdf" title="Download the 2025 annual report">Read more</a>
<!-- passes, but "Download the 2025 annual report (PDF)" as link text is better -->

Fails

<a href="/report.pdf">Click here</a>

How this gets tested

The W3C publishes test rules that define what a checker looks for here.

Link has non-empty accessible nameA tool can check this
Link in context is descriptiveA tool can check this
Links with identical accessible names and same context serve equivalent purposeA tool finds candidates, you decide
Link is descriptiveA tool can check this
Links with identical accessible names have equivalent purposeA tool can check this

Other ways to satisfy this rule

22 guides on this site are filed under 2.4.4 Link Purpose (In Context). W3C lists this one as sufficient for that rule when used for providing a supplemental description of the purpose of a link, so the condition is part of the test rather than a footnote to it.

This guide is our interpretation of W3C technique H33: Supplementing link text with the title attribute. 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.