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Re: Available title indication via css

for

From: Patrick H. Lauke
Date: Nov 11, 2017 5:43AM

On 11/11/2017 10:26, Wolfgang Berndorfer wrote:
> Hi Bim,
> Don’t only think of people with disabilities. Imagine, You find an
> abbreviation on a website, You don’t understand: If the abbreviation is
> visually perceivable as titled, You will hover with your mouse and get the
> meaning of the abbreviation as a browser functionality. If the
> TITLE-attribute wasn’t styled, You would probably not try to hover to get
> information. The titled abbreviation just looks like any other textelement.
> Styling would help You, if You are sighted and can use the mouse. Even if
> You need a magnification software, You benefit of the visual indication.
> If You need a screen reader, the information You get, depends on Your
> settings and not on the styling. But this is an other issue.
> <span lang="de" title="best regards">Beste Grüße!</span>
> Wolfgang

You're tackling the problem from the "we should make the fact there's a
title attribute on a random element visually clear", whereas the general
advice really is "don't use title attribute in general".

With the exception of MS Edge, no browser shows title attribute tooltips
even on focusable elements. Arbitrary, non-focusable elements with title
of course never show their title in any browser.

Instead of making the use of title more enticing with styling, we should
focus on avoiding title usage. For some elements like
acronyms/abbreviations, title has a clearly defined additional benefit
and per spec the expanded version of the acronym/abbreviation goes in
the title. But for arbitrary elements, you're really still just working
on something that for mouse users happens to provide a tooltip, but is
useless to most other users.

P
--
Patrick H. Lauke

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