RE: Proposed SC: Unique Titles - or - Unique & Updated Titles

All,

>From my understanding of webpages and user experience, the title should match what the user has selected that is stated they are going to. If not, then they are confused or don’t know if a new page or the correct page has loaded.

If on an insurance provider’s site I find a link under a Medicare page/section/portion of the site that says “Learn more about Dental Coverage” and it goes to a page that has a title of  “Dental Coverage” then it is telling me that it went to the page I thought it was going to.

If, I find a page on their site under a non-Medicare page/section/portion that says “Learn more about Dental Coverage” and it goes to a page that has a title of “Dental Coverage” then it also is telling me that it went to the page I thought it was going to.
In this case, however, they both are titled “Dental Coverage”.

So, do they really need to be unique or just titled so the user knows the proper page loaded?

Regards.

Alan Smith, CSTE, CQA

Sent from Mail for Windows 10

From: White, Jason J
Sent: Thursday, August 11, 2016 3:57 PM
To: Katie Haritos-Shea GMAIL; w3c-wai-gl@w3.org
Subject: RE: Proposed SC: Unique Titles - or - Unique & Updated Titles



From: Katie Haritos-Shea GMAIL [mailto:ryladog@gmail.com] 
Sent: Thursday, August 11, 2016 3:35 PM
To: w3c-wai-gl@w3.org
​​​​​I would like to start the conversation with WCAG with this suggested wording:

Web pages and screens (views?) have titles that are unique (to the site or application) when rendered.


[Jason] The granularity of conformance is the “Web page”, so it isn’t clear what “screens” or “views” are or how they relate to Web pages – the units of conformance for WCAG. After reading the above, it isn’t at all clear to me what this proposal means.
What we could say (based on existing definitions) is, for example, “The title of every page within a set of Web pages is unique with respect to that set of Web pages”. I’m not satisfied with this wording, but it’s closer to what I think we could easily propose. Now, what isn’t clear to me is how Katie’s proposal is intended to go beyond this, as I understand it is meant to do.
The underlying notion in my proposal here is that we take the same set of Web pages which is used for determining conformance, and require that they all have unique titles (that is, unique compared with other pages in the set). If all that is said to conform to WCAG is a single page, not a set of pages, then obviously the proposed SC wouldn’t apply. The restriction to the set of Web pages also entails that titles need not be unique throughout the Web, or throughout the universe of digital documents, etc., which is far too burdensome a requirement and impracticable to evaluate.
I would also be interested to know what accessibility benefits this proposal has; I assume they’re largely cognitive (by which I don’t just mean that they help people with cognitive disabilities). Still, a good case should be made that they affect users with disabilities differently from users in general.



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