Making Webpage Titles more accessible

Posted June 11, 2005

Recently I did a small stretch on accessibility and screen readers and I came across an interesting tidbit of information. This was something I had noticed, but never really thought about and this was a good explanation.

As you notice in the screenshots below from three common browsers, I am trying something new with my webpages. When I seperate a section of my site in the title of the webpage, I use a horizontal bar “|”.

Rothe Blog Browser Title Internet Explorere

There are many different kind of characters that you can use from a design point that make things interesting, these are some common ones;

However, when an inpaired user comes across any of these it reads them outloud. So, while you may want to have a site have that small detail to make it look cool, wouldn’t it make more sense to just give that idea up and make it less obxonious for all of those users?

I am using one “|” because it is simplest to be read, and that way, impaired users can actually skip parts of the title easier and move down to the main content of the page. When most browsers load a page, they put a “-” “browser name” at the end of the page title. By not using a “-” anywhere else in the title, this gives the user the ability to tell the reader to skip everything past the dash.

In this case, the reader would read the page title, and then go straight to the content or links, or whatever the user wants, without reading the name of the browser each time the page loads.

Not to be contradictory, for now, I am keeping the double ::, because I wanted a heiracrhy of seperation between the name of my website and the actual page structure.

Final Note

This information may be kind of trivial. I don’t know enough about screen readers to know if the users can sense a pattern in titles, or if they try to figure out a pattern, that they tell the reader to pick out certain title seperators and skip after them, anything from a dash to colons. I don’t really know, but for now, I think this is a helpful idea until I figure out otherwise, and from what I read online.