Proposed Test Rule: HTML page title is descriptive

Description

This rule checks that the first title in an HTML page describes the topic or purpose of that page.

Applicability

This rule applies to the first HTML title element that

is a descendant of the html element of a web page, and
contains children that are text nodes that are not only whitespace.

Expectation

The target element describes the topic or purpose of the overall content of the document.

Assumptions

This rule assumes that the language of each test target can be correctly determined (either programmatically or by analyzing the content), and sufficiently understood.

Accessibility Support

This rule assumes that browsers only recognize the first title element if multiple title elements are present in the document. Testing shows that this in general is the case. Therefore the scope of this rule is limited to only checking the first title element in a document.

Background

The title elements of embedded documents, such as those in iframe, object, or svg elements, are not applicable because those are not web pages according to the definition in WCAG.

The HTML specification - The title element requires that a document only has one title element, and that it is a child of the head element of a document. However, current HTML specification also describes what should happen in case of multiple titles, and titles outside the head element. Because of this, neither of these validation issues causes a conformance problem for WCAG.

HTML page has non-empty title
Understanding Success Criterion 2.4.2: Page titled
This rule is testing Technique G88: Providing descriptive titles for Web pages
A prerequisite for this rule is that Technique H25: Providing a title using the title element is used for living up to 2.4.2 Page Titled

Test Cases

Passed

Passed Example 1

This <title> element describes the content of the document.

<html lang="en">
	<head>
		<title>Clementine harvesting season</title>
	</head>
	<body>
		<p>
			Clementines will be ready to harvest from late October through February.
		</p>
	</body>
</html>

Passed Example 2

This <title> element, the first of two, describes the content of the document.

<html lang="en">
	<head>
		<title>Clementine harvesting season</title>
		<title>Second title is ignored</title>
	</head>
	<body>
		<p>
			Clementines will be ready to harvest from late October through February.
		</p>
	</body>
</html>

Passed Example 3

This <title> element, which is within the body, describes the content of the document. Even though it is not placed within the <head> element, as expected according to the HTML specification, the rule still passes because the browser fixes it and it doesn’t cause any known accessibility issues.

<html lang="en">
	<head> </head>
	<body>
		<title>Clementine harvesting season</title>
		<p>
			Clementines will be ready to harvest from late October through February.
		</p>
	</body>
</html>

Failed

Failed Example 1

This <title> element does not describe the content of the document.

<html lang="en">
	<head>
		<title>Apple harvesting season</title>
	</head>
	<body>
		<p>
			Clementines will be ready to harvest from late October through February.
		</p>
	</body>
</html>

Failed Example 2

This <title> element, the first of two, does not describe the content of the document. Most browsers, and this rule, only look at the first <title> element.

<html lang="en">
	<head>
		<title>First title is incorrect</title>
		<title>Clementine harvesting season</title>
	</head>
	<body>
		<p>
			Clementines will be ready to harvest from late October through February.
		</p>
	</body>
</html>

Inapplicable

Inapplicable Example 1

This title element is a child of an svg element.

<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
  <title>This is a circle</title>
  <circle cx="150" cy="75" r="50" fill="green"></circle>
</svg>

Glossary

Outcome

An outcome is a conclusion that comes from evaluating an ACT Rule on a test subject or one of its constituent test target. An outcome can be one of the three following types:

Inapplicable: No part of the test subject matches the applicability
Passed: A test target meets all expectations
Failed: A test target does not meet all expectations

Note: A rule has one passed or failed outcome for every test target. When there are no test targets the rule has one inapplicable outcome. This means that each test subject will have one or more outcomes.

Note: Implementations using the EARL10-Schema can express the outcome with the outcome property. In addition to passed, failed and inapplicable, EARL 1.0 also defined an incomplete outcome. While this cannot be the outcome of an ACT Rule when applied in its entirety, it often happens that rules are only partially evaluated. For example, when applicability was automated, but the expectations have to be evaluated manually. Such “interim” results can be expressed with the incomplete outcome.

Whitespace

Whitespace are characters that have the Unicode “White_Space” property in the Unicode properties list.

This includes:

all characters in the Unicode Separator categories, and
the following characters in the Other, Control category:
- Character tabulation (U+0009)
- Line Feed (LF) (U+000A)
- Line Tabulation (U+000B)
- Form Feed (FF) (U+000C)
- Carriage Return (CR) (U+000D)
- Next Line (NEL) (U+0085)

Implementations

There are currently no known implementations for this rule. If you would like to contribute an implementation, please read the ACT Implementations page for details.

Changelog

This is the first version of this ACT rule.