Level A · WCAG 2.0
2.4.2 Page Titled
Every page has a title that describes what the page is.
Partly automated Some failures are detectable, others need judgement.
How it fails in practice
Eight open tabs all reading “Home”. A single-page app that never updates the title on navigation, so the browser history is unusable.
How to fix it
Put the specific part first: “Checkout — payment | Shop”, not “Shop | Checkout — payment”. In an SPA, set it on every route change.
At a glance
- Level
- Level A — the minimum. Failing one of these usually makes something impossible rather than merely hard.
- Principle
- Operable
- Guideline
- 2.4 Navigable
- Added in
- WCAG 2.0
- EN 301 549
- 9.2.4.2
- Automated check
- Partly automated
Partly automated
How far an automated check gets
A tool finds some failures here and cannot see the rest. A clean automated result means the checks that exist found nothing — not that the criterion is met. This is the gap that makes a green scan look like an accessible site, and it is where the keyboard agent, the agents still in development and a human reviewer do the remaining work.
A missing or empty title is found on every page, and titles are compared across the site: one shared by pages with different content, or one that names no page at all, is reported. Whether a title describes its page is still a judgement.
Rules that check this criterion
document-titlePage title missing
The rule ids are axe-core’s (version 4.14.0), the open-source engine our scan runs, and our keyboard agent’s — the names a report or a CI log will show. An underlined id has a page of its own here.
Related criteria
Other criteria under the same guideline.
Further reading
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document-title
The axe rule document-title flags a page with no title element or an empty one. What a good title looks like and how to fix it, with code example.
Find out which criteria your site fails
We scan up to 100 pages against WCAG 2.2 AA, send the keyboard agent through the page you name and email you the report — free, once, no strings.