A form field is labelled only by a tooltip
6.1%
of the 609 sites we scanned fail this
Ranging from 2.7% of Shopify DTC stores to 8.4% of EU e-commerce. Pooled across five targeted cohorts, so treat it as a convenience sample rather than a rate for the web.
What it means and how to fix it
A title attribute isn't a label. It's unreliable across screen readers, never appears on touch devices, and is invisible to keyboard users, so the field can be announced as just “edit text”.
The fix. Add a visible label associated with the field by its id.
What it looks like in code
HTML<input type="search" placeholder="..." value="" name="s" title="..." aria-labelledby="..."><label for="search">Search</label>
<input id="search" type="search">A title attribute is not a label. It is unreliable on touch, inconsistent across screen readers, and invisible to keyboard users.
The failing example is real markup from a site in our research cohorts. Class, style and data attributes are removed, and ... marks a value we elided. The structure is unchanged, because the structure is the failure.
How often it fails
Share of scanned sites in each cohort. These are five targeted studies, not a random sample of the web, so read the contrast between cohorts rather than any one figure as a web-wide rate.
Who fails it most3 cuts by sector, CMS vendor, state
By sector
By CMS vendor
By state
Groups smaller than 8 sites are not shown: a rate over a handful of sites moves by tens of points on a single result.
What this does not measureLimits of these figures, and where the corpus came from
- This rule maps to no success criterion, so a site failing it is not failing WCAG. It is still worth fixing: these are the patterns that decide whether assistive technology can navigate a page efficiently rather than merely read it.
- These are five targeted cohorts, not a random sample of the web. Per-cohort rates are the figure to quote; the pooled rate is a convenience sample.
- Denominators count sites that produced a result. Sites that were blocked or errored are excluded rather than counted as passing.
- Occurrence counts are floors: the engine records at most 25 occurrences of a rule per page.
- The EU and Indian cohorts retained only the primary success criterion per finding, so a rule mapping to several criteria contributes to one of them in those two cohorts and to all of them in the other three.
| Cohort | Scanned | Attempted |
|---|---|---|
| Shopify DTC stores | 75 | 75 |
| US local government | 158 | 221 |
| US healthcare providers | 208 | 218 |
| EU e-commerce | 107 | 170 |
| Indian financial services | 61 | 72 |
Corpus generated 2026-09-18.
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