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Comment by bastawhiz | Hacker News Reader

The title attribute isn't supportive of accessibility. It also doesn't work on touch screens.

From https://www.a11y-collective.com/blog/aria-label-vs-title/

> The content of the title attribute is often ignored or read inconsistently, leaving users who rely on assistive technology at a disadvantage.

Regardless of whether screen readers should better support title attributes, that's not the world we live in and blind users don't benefit from websites that fail to work because of principled takes.

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It is frustrating that instead of fixing existing, fairly simple interfaces, web tech seems to instead create complicated and harder to use interfaces which are more likely to be used incorrectly or at least inconsistently. It feels like it's likely to make the problem worse, not better, in the long run.

(like, even if it was spelt differently due to backwards compatibility, it would be nice to just have a 'insert tooltip text here' interface that did work on desktop, mobile, and in screen readers. This doesn't feel like it's beyond the wit of man)

That's the thing, though. Tooltips aren't just text. Qt, GTK, and Windows all support some flavor of rich text tooltips, so it's not even an operating system constraint. The simplest solution for this in an accessible way looks exactly like Aria labels.

But here's the thing: a text tooltip assumes the label you show to screen readers is the tooltip. That's not always true. In this case, the tooltip serves the purpose of labeling a button icon. A tooltip on a text button doesn't have the same purpose from an accessibility standpoint. There's simply no universal way to define what a tooltip is in a way that semantically correct.

Aria spec is nearly 20 years old, with the first drafts being out in 2006. Labelledby was a core part of the first spec, and is not particularly complicated.

There is no way to make a change to title attribute that isn't breaking to some use cases if you want it to support everything label/labelledby supports.

That said, if you are talking about tooltips, which are different from accessibility attributes, I digress. Tooltips have always been a software nightmare, and the web is no exception.

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