Tooltip

The tooltip is a common graphical user interface element. It is used in conjunction with a cursor, usually a mouse pointer. The user hovers the cursor over an item, without clicking it, and a small box appears with a name or description of the item being hovered over. A common variant, especially in older software, is displaying a description of the tool in a status bar, but such descriptions are not usually called tooltips. Another system that aims to solve the same problem, but in a slightly different way, is balloon help. Another term for tooltip, used in Microsoft end-user documentation, is ScreenTip.

A good example of tooltips are the widely used tooltips on web pages. Many graphical web browsers display the attribute "title" of an HTML element when it is hovered.

For HTML elements, the TITLE attribute is used to add tooltips to elements on a web page. Screen reader does not read TITLE that contains the same information as the hyperlink.

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