Media Uploaded not Saving Image Titles

I started having the same issue when I upgraded to 3.5. Have not found a solution yet.

@bts31: As per the Forum Welcome, please post your own topic. Posting in an existing topic prevents us from being able to track issues by topic. Added to which, your problem – despite any similarity in symptoms – is likely to be completely different.

Any ideas what could be causing this?

The automatic addition of the title attribute to image markup was removed in WordPress 3.5. Tooltips can still be added by opening the Edit Image modal and inserting something into the title attribute box. The only change is that the “Title” field — which is the name of an image’s attachment page — does not populate the title attribute.

The automatic addition of the title attribute to image markup was removed in WordPress 3.5. Tooltips can still be added by opening the Edit Image modal and inserting something into the title attribute box. The only change is that the “Title” field — which is the name of an image’s attachment page — does not populate the title attribute.

But…why? That makes it so much harder when you’re mass adding images to your post and want them to all have titles.

It’s a web accessibility issue.

What does that mean?

The previous markup was causing issues for users/visitors with disabilities

So there’s nothing I can do, except manually add the titles to the images in the posts then?

Correct – unless someone comes up with a plugin to add title attributes into to image markup automatically. However you might want to bear in mind that sites with higher accessibility levels tend to do far better in Google than their non-accessible counterparts.

How does having titles in the images limit accessibility? If anything, I thought it made it easier. And I thought it helped improve your SEO as well.

Screen reader, switch, VR users and sighted keyboard navigators do not have access to the title attribute, therefore any information that is being presented via that attribute is hidden from them. Site authors should NEVER rely on that attribute to convey information that, ideally, should be presented in clear text on the page. This contravenes the first of the 4 principles of web accessibility – that content should be Perceivable. WordPress core is now merely following best practice in this regard by not auto-inserting non-perceivable content.

If something is worth putting in a title attribute, then 9 times out of 10, it should be on the page instead – where everyone can see it.

And fwiw, titles attributes are weighted lower than plain text by Google – thanks to years of people try to use them to keyword stuff. :-/

Is the alt tag also useless then?

Absolutely not! It’s used by screen reading software and other non-graphical user agents to render a description of the image as the users of this software type cannot actually see the image. So, for example, if you posted an image of a chart, the alt attribute might contain a short summary of what the chart shows. Or if you use a header image as a link to the front of your site, the alt attribute might say “Home” or something else short but meaningful.

In general, it’s a “what to show when the image can’t be shown” fallback. Google does take note of image alt attributes (after all, it cannot “see”) but, again, don’t use the attribute to keyword stuff. That won’t go down well with Google or with disabled users who are then bombarded with spam-like text. Like The Force, use it wisely. ??

It’s also quite permissible to leave the alt attribute blank if the image is just a bit of eye candy with no actual informative value within the page.

Here’s a very quick but useful test: imagine reading out a page on your site to someone over the phone. Do you have to stop to explain any images? If “yes”, then those images should have short descriptions in the alt attribute. If “no”, then those images can safely be left with a null (alt="“) alt attribute.

HTH