Accessibility: Remove title attributes - They serve no useful purpose

[netweb]

via Karl Groves bbPress Accessibility Feedback ​https://gist.github.com/ntwb/c8f99df8a714ed028e2d

See also ​#WP24766 - Title attributes galore. They serve no useful purpose.

The title attribute provides a tooltip on certain browsers. Other than that, it is essentially useless. As provided in Wordpress, the title attribute is both redundant and useless, because in most cases, it is a complete duplicate of the link's text. Therefore the tooltip provided is of no value whatsoever.

For users of assistive technologies, the title attribute is useless at best and sometimes an annoyance. Users of text-to-speech software who have configured their software to do so will hear the title attribute twice.

[netweb]

A couple of comments from the related WordPress upstream ​#WP24766 for a bit more context:

Replying to sabreuse:

These all appear to be tooltips on links -- mostly things like "see all posts in $category". Furthermore, the proposed changes don't do anything to take away the end user's ability to add a tooltip to their own links in content.

+1 to remove, because of the accessibility concerns and not just for random clutter-busting.

Replying to sabreuse:

(But seriously. Users should be able to add tooltips to their content, but the list in this ticket is UI elements + template tags -- stuff that isn't part of the content editing workflow at all.)

Replying to nacin:

So, basically, some questions to ask:

• Does the title attribute add some useful information to the anchor text?
• Are they designed to be used as tooltips?
• Are we removing an API?

[johnjamesjacoby]

Bumping to 2.7 so we can clear out Awaiting Review and 2.6 milestones.

[johnjamesjacoby]

Bumping all 2.7 to 2.8 milestone.

[netweb]

Related: ​#meta1973, ​meta:changeset:3948, ​meta:changeset:3949