Re: Accessibility of HTML title attribute for tooltips

There is another solution which, if done properly, achieves the goal which
tooltips are often used for. Designers often use tooltips to reveal more
detail when they, quite rightly, don't want to show lots of minor detail as
static text, as that clutters up the page unnecessarily and hampers
everybody. So they use a title tooltip which mouse users can see if they
want to by hovering. Unfortunately, as Marc Haunschild just pointed out,
they are not user friendly especially for keyboard users, and also screen
reader users, who have to see or hear them every time they land on the
item, whether they want to or not. (And if they navigate up and down the
page 10 times, they still get shown these annoying tooltips every time -
Uuugh!)

But you can achieve a similar thing by placing a small <button> beside the
item, that will reveal the text on mouse click (or even hover), or to
keyboard users and screen reader users if they press Enter. (Designers
frequently show it as an "i" icon, for Information, but using a text label
of "info" would also do.) Now the screen reader and keyboard users only
have to see the popup texts when they explicitly ask for it. Problem
solved, but make sure they have a way to dismiss them.

Aside from that, one of the most common mistakes developers make is to add
a tooltip on every link and button, that simply repeats the text shown in
the link or button! I cannot think of any reason why they do this, though
probably someone here knows. Maybe that's the case on the site you are
looking at?

Now users of most screen readers have to listen to everything twice over
which is most annoying. And even though mouse and keyboard users quickly
realise what's going on, mouse users still often instinctively feel they
need to read them just in case they are showing something important.