One classic example of this is that the word "menu" in web UI has acquired both a broad, generic meaning as well as a specific and technical one. This presents a problem when trying to create a specification for a consistent, accessible experience, since visual patterns do not always have a one-to-one relationship with interaction patterns.Ī major pitfall of approaching web design as a visual medium is conflating visual patterns with functional or interaction patterns.
Conventionally, the term has referred to a purely visual treatment: text that appears in a small overlay on demand, usually when hovering over the thing it describes.
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Usually "use native controls" is the mantra of accessibility professionals, so if the native tooltip is flawed all the way down to its very design, where does that leave designers and developers? The short answer is out in the rain without a popup (or "umbrella" for those who live in the real world) for shelter.īefore diving into the details of how to implement a custom tooltip, let's take a moment to define what a tooltip really is. Beyond the title attribute: what are tooltips now? Continuing problems caused by the title attribute's non-inclusive tooltip have also been thoroughly documented (try this wonderfully comprehensive 24a11y article by Scott O'Hara for a start). The alt text tooltip directly demonstrated how easily that type of design can degrade the experience for anyone relying on non-mouse-based interaction or assistive tech. From the very beginning, the behavior of a native tooltip has made it easy to create content solely for mouse users with good vision while forgetting about everyone else. There are articles written about the harmful effect of the tooltip treatment as well a compilation of hilarious examples of real live alt text from that time (imagine image after image with the alt text "Click here!").Īlthough alt text no longer gets the tooltip treatment in any modern browser, looking back at that era illustrates a deeper issue with the design itself. Although alt still functioned as a text alternative, the tooltip implementation changed how website authors wrote alt text content. If the history of the image tag seems like an odd digression for an article about tooltips, the reason lies in what happened next: browsers began to actually implement the alt attribute, but they chose to visually display it as a tooltip, just like the title attribute on links. Although the alt attribute was included in the img specification from the very start, practical support was slow and for years screen readers and text-only browsers had no good way of communicating a graphic. The image tag was first proposed by a browser representative (from Mosaic, since this happened in 1993) as more of an advance notice than a suggestion. But back in the earlier days of the web, it was open season on defining experiences solely for sighted mouse users.
The same inaccessible mouse-based title behavior exists, but at least the latest version of the HTML spec explicitly calls out the accessibility problems while warning against using it. Now, 26 years in the future, we're doing a little bit better.
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The browser software may chose to display the title of the document as a preliminary to retrieving it, for example as a margin note or on a small box while the mouse is over the anchor, or during document fetch.Īt the time that spec was written, graphical screen readers had already existed for over four years. The first hint of a graphical tooltip on the web came in an early draft of HTML when "title" appeared as an optional attribute on links with the following note: So why do tooltips have so many problems?
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