Page Title

Now for the first thing, I want to talk about page titles. They seem to be like a super small thing,

but they are super important. So if we look at the browser over here, we have a couple of tabs open.

And one of the most important thing is that you know what is behind which tab.

So we have the Writing for Accessibility Tips for Getting Started here at the top.

And here we have the "How to meet WCAG". Then we have "Page structure tutorial", "Web Accessibility Initiative". And these are all on the same domain. So they have the same icon and they follow roughly the same structure in the title.

And the guidance for page titles is that they are short and that they are appropriate for the page that they're on so that they reflect basically what the user is looking for.

And that's pretty important. And the page title is used in different places. So it can be used as the title on your search engine results, or it can be used if you share a link on social media, it will show up there. So page titles are incredibly important.

And there are a couple of things that you should think about when you're using them.

So the first one is that on the homepage, you usually don't need to put in like home or something like that.

It's pretty self-explanatory.

But you want to be, you know, make sure that it describes the website itself very well.

Like we have here at Access Lab, we just write Access Lab Digital Accessibility Consultants Reviews.

development, which is perfect. No additional information. On my website, I have home, and then my name, because I thought that would be appropriate for there. Just trying to keep it consistent.

Then you want to have the most important part at the front.

So we call that front loading of the information.

So if you have a latest news page, like here, this Space Teddy Inc. has the latest news page on the front.

And then it has the rest basically at the back, like what is this?

And it goes from more specific to less specific.

And if you look at the Access Lab page, if you go to products, it says Access Lab products, which is totally fine.

Access Lab articles.

This can be done this way because Access Lab is very short.

I personally like to put the more specific thing at the front.

So if you go to my website and go to the blog, it will say just blog.

It should say blog Eric Egger, but it doesn't.

So, there's the bug for you.

And then here it is back to how it should be with the blog post at the front and then

the site name basically at the end.

And the same is done on the W3C page.

So here we have writing for accessibility, tips for getting started.

And then there is a pipe, like a vertical line, and that goes then to design and develop.

Oh no, it goes directly to Web Accessibility Initiative and then to W3C.

And that makes a lot of sense for this type of website.

So you don't need to have the full breadcrumb inside of your title.

That's too much.

And titles are important because that is the information you get directly after the page loaded if you're using a screen reader or other assistive technology.

So it can be useful if you have an error message, if you have like interaction with a form, like you have multiple steps, then you can put the step count in your title as well.

gives everyone like a really nice information on that. What does BrickHack say about that?

BrickHack basically only says page titled, and that's 2.4.2. And it's a very simple success

criterion. It says web pages have titles that describe topic or purpose. So this doesn't

really say anything about like, oh, put the most important at the front or anything like that. So,

especially if your title is not super generic, you will meet this super easily and most websites do.

And especially for like normal content websites like WordPress or something like that,

the built-in solutions are pretty good. Where you get into problems with this is if you have

something like a single page application and they sometimes are programmed in a way that

the title doesn't change. So you always have like my awesome app. And even if you are on settings

or inside some specific page, it doesn't change what it says in the title and that is confusing

to people.

So you want to make sure that the page title is specific enough.