Widgets adding unwanted titles

Try deactivating all of your plugins to explore whether any could be responsible. If none are, keep all plugins deactivated and switch to the Twenty Fifteen/ Fourteen theme to see whether it could an issue with your theme.

Okay thanks, but this is a process of elimination with too many steps at the end of which I probably won’t find the culprit. Anyone else have a fix? Thanks!

@karunaray,

Sorry to hear that , archives and some how tags or some other plugins when ever they are used as a widget they came with their default titles which are hard coded in their respective files, if you don’t need them you just go to that files, if archives used then find archives.php in your theme or if tags then tags, of if some other plugin then you need to dig into the plugin for that cause.
Find the file, find the title and remove or comment it.
Hope this will fix your problem

Regards,
Haisum

Okay, I understand that. But it wasn’t like that for a very long time; see the links I provided. Not sure when it started. What you’re saying is one of the WordPress updates probably added default titles when before they weren’t there. Haven’t updated theme; only update WP whenever there is one… Annoying that things like this change and it’s near impossible to track!

@karunaray,

It absolutely possible to track it, if you want me to do it for you please let me know via email: at [Address redacted]
and if you want to do it then find the files and find the titles in them.As i have done it a lot of times.

Regards,
Haisum

@karunaray: Those are screen-reader-text blocks. They were added to WordPress six years ago, and support for them was expanded back in January:
https://make.www.ads-software.com/themes/2015/01/26/supporting-screen-reader-text/

You need to update your theme to hide screen reader text by default. This is relatively easy to do. Add this to the CSS file for your theme:

/* Text meant only for screen readers. */
.screen-reader-text {
	clip: rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);
	position: absolute !important;
	height: 1px;
	width: 1px;
	overflow: hidden;
}

.screen-reader-text:focus {
	background-color: #f1f1f1;
	border-radius: 3px;
	box-shadow: 0 0 2px 2px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6);
	clip: auto !important;
	color: #21759b;
	display: block;
	font-size: 14px;
	font-size: 0.875rem;
	font-weight: bold;
	height: auto;
	left: 5px;
	line-height: normal;
	padding: 15px 23px 14px;
	text-decoration: none;
	top: 5px;
	width: auto;
	z-index: 100000; /* Above WP toolbar. */
}

This example code comes from here:

https://codex.www.ads-software.com/CSS#WordPress_Generated_Classes

Bam solved! Glad I kept this thread alive. Much thanks and kudos to @otto!!!