---
name: Page title
slug: page-title
category: accessibility
status: published
created: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
modified: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
definition: The document title, the first thing a screen reader speaks and the
  only label a reader has when picking between tabs, windows, and history
  entries.
aliases:
  - name: document title
    source: community
  - name: page titled
    source: wcag
  - name: title element
    source: whatwg-html
  - name: tab title
    source: community
tags:
  - assistive-tech
  - content-design
  - navigation
relations:
  contrastWith:
    - heading-hierarchy
    - route-announcement
  variantOf: []
  partOf: []
  seeAlso:
    - breadcrumbs
implementations: []
sources:
  - title: "WCAG 2.2: Page Titled"
    url: https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG22/#page-titled
demo: inline
exhibit: false
useWhen: the label a page carries outside its own viewport
---

The `title` element is the only piece of a page that has to work from outside the page.
It is spoken first when a screen reader loads a document, before any heading, so it is
how somebody learns where they landed. It is also the label on the tab, in the window
switcher, in the history menu, in a bookmark, and in a search result. WCAG's success
criterion 2.4.2 asks only that it describe the topic or purpose, which sounds trivial
until you count how many products ship every route with the same eight words.

Order matters more than length, because everything downstream truncates from the right. A
narrow tab shows perhaps fifteen characters, and a screen reader user listening to a list
of open windows is waiting for the part that differs. Put the specific first and the
product last: "Settings, Mail" rather than "Mail, Settings". Two pages should never carry
the same title, and state that changes the answer to "where am I" belongs in the title
too: an unread count, a step number in a checkout, an unsaved marker, an error count on a
form that just failed validation.

The characteristic failure now is the single page application. Client-side routing swaps
the view without touching `document.title`, so every history entry reads the same, the
tab never changes, and a reader who navigated is given nothing at all: no load event, no
new title, no announcement. Setting the title on every route change is half the fix. The
other half is telling somebody it happened, either by moving focus to the new view's
heading ([focus management](/focus-management)) or by announcing the new title through a
[live region](/live-region), because a title that changes silently is a title nobody
hears.

One caution about writing them. A title is not a place for keyword stuffing or for a
breadcrumb of the whole hierarchy. Long titles are cut off in exactly the places they are
read, and the reader is left with three levels of ancestry and no idea which page they
are on.