Why Title Attribute Field should remain filled in

Hi there,

I’m sorry to hear that this is happening for you, but unfortunately I can’t seem to reproduce this with WordPress 4.9.4, with one of the default themes activated and no plugins. As far as I’m aware, this is also not something that WordPress would do out of the box.

I would like to ask you what browser you are using when this happens. Because it’s entirely possible that this is a bug that’s specific to a certain browser and so that information is really super helpful.

Alternatively, it could be the theme or any of the plugins that you’re using on the site that may be causing this behaviour. Do you have a testing environment for the site where you can safely disable themes or plugins to try and see if that may be the issue?

Hi Jeffrey,

I’m using Chrome.

As an aside, when I asked the question differently I got the reply on this forum that WordPress had stopped providing the Title Attribute field after 3.5… many many years ago. I was told it was BAD practice to use the field.

Are you saying that when you fill in the Title Attribute field for an image, and move the image, the field remains filled in?

Okay, great. I’m using Chrome too. So then it’s not a browser related bug.

But yes, on links the title attribute is really not ideal and so that field was removed from WordPress.

But for images the field should still be available (albeit a bit more hidden under the Advanced Options) and it does indeed retain its value for me when I move the image around the page.

This is what happens in my editor:

I’ve never seen anything on my site like your example. It looks completely foreign and strange.

According to Google the field is useful to its organization of images to provide for search image results.

I’m not sure you understand the problem I’m trying to get fixed.

Did you actually have a page with an image with the Title Attribute filled in, and move it… without the field going blank?

move the image, I mean… For instance, if you have images with Title Attribute filled in, and you open them in a new page are the fields blank or filled in?

Oh, so hold on. When you say “move the image”, you mean “add it to another page”?

Because there are two places where you can change these fields. One will be specific for the page that you are editing, which won’t be saved back onto the image (you’d do this through the dialog in my image that looked foreign to you though). The other is through the Media Library, or when you are initially adding the image to the page, and any changes there will then also be used when adding the image to other pages from then on.

However, the title attribute will never be added to the page markup by default and will always need to be add manually. This is the only time I see a blank title field, when I want to change the fields on an image I’ve just added to the page. The alt field is always filled in for me.

I don’t think Google actually uses the image title attribute for much anymore though, and it ultimately causes inconsistency issues from an accessibility standpoint too. That is, not every screen reader will announce its presence consistently, meaning that those users run a high risk of missing that information. Especially if it’s different from the alt text.

Thanks, Jeffrey,

This is very interesting. I was thinking yesterday about how an image may be used to illustrate different things on different pages, so my Title Attribute could change, even the Alt Text could be different.

I didn’t realize until you wrote this, that filling in the fields for an image on a page, rather than for the image in the media library, are very different in terms of the information being retained with the image.

Thank you so much!

My understanding is that Google uses the information regularly in terms of Images and searches for them…

I used to think that Google bots picked up the caption, but apparently not. It seems as if they should.

Karen ??

Silly forum just let me fill in a reply box without being logged in, so it was lost.

I hope you see this, since I marked my question as resolved.

I now wonder if the Description box for images in the Media Library is effectively the same as Title Attribute… Do you know? And, if not, where is this information used???