For the HTML title attribute, Mozilla's docs mention...

Use of the title attribute is highly problematic for:

People using touch-only devices
People navigating with keyboards
People navigating with assistive technology such as screen readers or magnifiers
People experiencing fine motor control impairment
People with cognitive concerns

This gives me a seed of doubt whether I can innocuously use title all over the place.

Would the mere existence of title actually introduce problems for certain users?

Or put another way, is there any benefit using title other than for showing-supplementary-information-as-rudimentary-tooltips-for-mouse-users-that-hover-an-element?

I'm just trying to maximize my UX & accessibility optimizations to 110%.

CodePudding user response：

I can conceive of three different problems that using title attributes can introduce for those various groups.

No access

Some users don't use technology that would display the title attribute. This isn't a problem is the title attribute contains information that isn't required to understand the content.

Physically getting in the way

A tooltip might cover up some other information when it is rendered. You can probably compensate for this with space. Don't cram everything together. Allow enough room on a hover target so a tooltip can render in empty space, or at least space that doesn't contain information about the element being hovered.

Interruptions

If you scatter titles in the middle of a sentence, then I expect some screen readers will interrupt the sentence to read the tooltip. This won't make it easy to understand the document if it happens a lot.

I wouldn't go overboard with them.

(Related, but less of an accessibility issue, if the titles duplicate information in the text, then it is going to be very repetitive and annoying).

CodePudding user response：

That depends, as always. Usage of the title attribute is not harmful, but relying on it is.

To quote the HTML standard:

Relying on the title attribute is currently discouraged as many user agents do not expose the attribute in an accessible manner as required by this specification (e.g., requiring a pointing device such as a mouse to cause a tooltip to appear, which excludes keyboard-only users and touch-only users, such as anyone with a modern phone or tablet).

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/dom.html#the-title-attribute

Mostly, title is used to implement the tooltip pattern, which is then not very accessible, as stated.

So if you provide that supplemental information by accessible means as well, the title attribute does most likely not harm.

“[…] is there any benefit using title other than for showing-supplementary-information-as-rudimentary-tooltips-for-mouse-users-that-hover-an-element?”

Well, the WCAG accept title attributes as a sufficient technique to explain abbreviations in an <abbr> element or to label form controls, even though actual technical support is not great.

To name <iframe> elements it is still the only documented sufficient technique

If you use it on <style> and <link> elements, it allows the browser to provide a style switcher.

<link rel="stylesheet" href="dark.css" title="Dark Theme">

See also The Trials and Tribulations of the Title Attribute