Lesson 7: Page Title

First off, give yourself a pat on the back! If you've been following lessons in order, we've made it through the 6 most common automatically detectable errors according to The 2024 WebAIM Million report. It's reported these represent 96.4% of all errors detected.

Background

Now it's time to branch out. We're starting with high-level accessibility improvements you can make with minimal time and effort and will slowly dig deeper for the last few lessons. What's higher level than a page's title?

A page title is the first thing users will see or hear when they visit your site. Search engines use page titles to present accurate results (and hopefully bring in more users). It helps users navigate between pages and quickly find the information they need.

That's a lot of responsibility for such a lil' dude! Which means improving page titles has huge potential for impacting site traffic and user happiness. And happy users are loyal users that tell their friends about how awesome your site is. 😊

5-minute action steps

1. Go to https://qualweb.di.fc.ul.pt/evaluator in your browser
2. Locate the "Insert url here" text input
3. Enter the page URL you want to check
4. Wait for the evaluation to complete
5. Locate the "Search" text input
6. Enter "html page has a title"
7. There should be one result after the text input
8. Expand the result
9. Make note of the full title

Analyzing the results

There's two results QualWeb will provide for the page title check: Passed or Failed. If there is no page title present, the result will be Failed.

As for the quality of the page title, that can take some manual review. Here are some best practices checks you can quickly do:

• Is it accurate for the page content?
• Is it different from other pages?
• Is the unique part "front-loaded"? (e.g. "About | SFCG" vs. "SFCG | About")

Reminder: Do this process one page at a time. You don't have to fix every page title all in one movement. Start small, make a plan, and commit to it.

Share your results

The end goal of this exercise is to resolve the issues you've found. Tracking them in your project management system is a huge step toward that goal. Sometimes we can't fix accessibility issues immediately, but we can always chip away at them over time.

Share the results you've noted today with the person or team responsible for fixing these kinds of issues. You might start the conversation with, "I'm learning to review web page titles, and these are some of my results."