The alt
attribute is defined in a set of tags (namely, img
, area
and optionally for input
and applet
) to allow you to provide a text equivalent for the object.
A text equivalent brings the following benefits to your web site and its visitors in the following common situations:
The objective of this technique is to provide context sensitive help for users as they enter data in forms by providing the help information in a title
attribute. The help may include format information or examples of input.
Example 1: A pulldown menu that limits the scope of a search
A search form uses a pulldown menu to limit the scope of the search. The pulldown menu is immediately adjacent to the text field used to enter the search term. The relationship between the search field and the pulldown menu is clear to users who can see the visual design, which does not have room for a visible label. The title
attribute is used to identify the select
menu. The title
attribute can be spoken by screen readers or displayed as a tool tip for people using screen magnifiers.
<label for="searchTerm">Search for:</label>
<input id="searchTerm" type="text" size="30" value="" name="searchTerm">
<select title="Search in" id="scope">
...
</select>
Example 2: Input fields for a phone number
A Web page contains controls for entering a phone number in the United States, with three fields for area code, exchange, and last four digits.
<fieldset>
<legend>Phone number</legend>
<input id="areaCode" name="areaCode" title="Area Code" type="text" size="3" value="" >
<input id="exchange" name="exchange" title="First three digits of phone number" type="text" size="3" value="" >
<input id="lastDigits" name="lastDigits" title="Last four digits of phone number" type="text" size="4" value="" >
</fieldset>
Example 3: A Search Function
A Web page contains a text field where the user can enter search terms and a button labeled "Search" for performing the search. The title
attribute is used to identify the form control and the button is positioned right after the text field so that it is clear to the user that the text field is where the search term should be entered.
<input type="text" title="Type search term here"/> <input type="submit" value="Search"/>
Example 4: A data table of form controls
A data table of form controls needs to associate each control with the column and row headers for that cell. Without a title (or off-screen LABEL) it is difficult for non-visual users to pause and interrogate for corresponding row/column header values using their assistive technology while tabbing through the form.
For example, a survey form has four column headers in first row: Question, Agree, Undecided, Disagree. Each following row contains a question and a radio button in each cell corresponding to answer choice in the three columns. The title attribute for every radio button is a concatenation of the answer choice (column header) and the text of the question (row header) with a hyphen or colon as a separator.
Allowed attributes mentioned at MDN.
alt
crossorigin
decoding
height
importance
(experimental api)intrinsicsize
(experimental api)ismap
referrerpolicy
(experimental api)src
srcset
width
usemap
As you can see title
attribute is not allowed inside img
element. I would use alt
attribute and if requires I would use CSS (Example: pseudo class :hover
) instead of title
attribute.