How to fix: Frames must have a title
Every <iframe> needs a title describing its content so screen-reader users can decide whether to move into it.
The fix
Add a descriptive title attribute to every <iframe>.
Who this affects
Reading down a page in NVDA or JAWS browse mode, the user hears each frame boundary announced along with its title; where there is no title there is nothing to announce, and the embed is an unidentified box in the reading order. JAWS users can open a list of every frame on the page with Insert+F9 and jump between them, and untitled entries make that list worthless, leaving them to enter each frame and read a few lines to work out what it holds. On a page carrying an embedded video, a map and a payment field, that is three anonymous boxes to explore in turn.
Before and after
<iframe src="https://maps.example.com/embed"></iframe><iframe src="https://maps.example.com/embed" title="Map of our office location"></iframe>Where this usually comes from
- Third-party embed code pasted exactly as supplied from a chat widget, ad slot or social embed that ships no title attribute.
- A tag manager or analytics script injecting tracking iframes at runtime; those given tabindex="-1" are skipped by the rule, and the ones without it are reported.
- A design-system Embed or VideoPlayer component that accepts a src prop but exposes no title prop, so nothing can be passed down even when the author knows the content.
- A CMS rich-text field where editors paste raw iframe HTML, leaving the title to whoever did the pasting.
- A generic value reused across the page, such as title="iframe" or title="embed", which satisfies this rule while the separate frame-title-unique rule reports it and the frames list stays undifferentiated.
Checking it yourself
Run $$('iframe').map(f => f.title) in the DevTools Console and read the array; blanks and repeated strings are the failures. With NVDA running, press the down arrow through the page in browse mode and listen at each embed for a name following the word "frame". In JAWS, Insert+F9 opens the frames list, which shows you exactly the choices a user is given. Note that aria-label and aria-labelledby satisfy the rule too, so a frame with no title attribute is not automatically a failure.
A scanner finds this one automatically. What it cannot judge, and how the score is built, is on how we test.
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