WCAG 2.4.2
Page Titled
1.8%
of the 609 sites we scanned fail this
Ranging from 1% of US healthcare providers 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.
Separately, 91.4% of the 941 county government PDFs we scanned fail it (860 documents). That is a different population from the sites above, so the two figures are not comparable. How we scanned the PDFs
What it means and how to fix it
What 2.4.2 covers
- We detect this: A missing or empty title element
- We detect this: A PDF with no document title, or one set to show the file name insteadChecked from the document metadata and its viewer preferences.
- No engine can detect this: A title that exists but does not describe the pageA title of "Home" or "Untitled Document" passes automatically. This is the part of the criterion that actually bites, and it needs a person.
- Partly detected: Single-page apps that never update the title on navigationA page scan sees one title. Our journey mode moves between views and can see the title failing to change.
Of that, one failure is detectable automatically, and these are what the rates on this page measure. Each needs its own fix. The percentage is the share of all 609 scanned sites affected. These do not sum to the 1.8% above: a site can fail more than one of them, and most that fail any fail several.
- The page has no descriptive title1.8%
Screen reader users cannot identify the current page without a descriptive document title.
What it looks like in code
HTML<html lang="en" dir="ltr"></html><head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>Delivery details - Checkout - Example Store</title>
</head>The title is the first thing a screen reader announces and the label on every tab and bookmark. Lead with what is unique to the page, not the site name, because that is what gets truncated.
Shown for The page has no descriptive title. 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.
For what the criterion formally requires, read the W3C Understanding document.
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 most2 cuts by sector, country
By sector
By country
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 the numbers do not say
A missing page title is close to the cheapest defect in accessibility, and the rate reflects that: 11 sites of 609. The concentration is odd enough to note rather than explain, though: 5 of the 8 EU fashion sites in the sample fail, which is the single highest rate of any group we cut this criterion by. Eight sites is a small group, so treat it as something to look at rather than a finding.
What this does not measureLimits of these figures, and where the corpus came from
- 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.
Check your own site
A free scan reports WCAG 2.4.2 alongside everything else, with the exact elements that fail.
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