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Accessibility
How must tooltips and popovers on websites be operable?
Popovers that appear on mouse contact or keyboard focus — tooltips, submenus, info bubbles — must meet three conditions: the visitor can close them again without moving the mouse, usually with the Escape key. They can move the mouse onto the popover without it disappearing. And it stays open until they close it themselves or navigate away.
Three rules for every popover
Anyone working with heavy screen magnification only ever sees a portion of the page. If a tooltip opens on mouse contact, it can quickly cover, in the zoomed-in view, exactly the text the visitor is currently reading — and with no way to close it, they're stuck. Hence the first rule: dismissible, typically via the Escape key. The second rule concerns the same group: to read a popover while zoomed in, you have to be able to move the mouse onto it — if it disappears the moment you leave the trigger, its content stays out of reach. The third rule requires persistence: a popover that disappears on its own after a few seconds is worthless for slow readers. Classic trouble spots are custom-built submenus and info icons in forms.
How our audit handles popovers
Popovers only reveal themselves through interaction: you have to move the mouse over the trigger, press Escape, watch how long it stays open. Our measurement engine performs targeted, passive interactions on your page — it moves through the page with keyboard focus, for instance, and observes the behaviour. But that doesn't deliver a complete judgment on all three conditions for every single popover; following our principle, nothing counts as passed here without genuine evidence. The report therefore marks the criterion as a human check point. At the Gold Standard level, an auditor operates the popovers on your page with mouse and keyboard and documents every one that can't be closed, disappears fleetingly, or can't be reached.
- Hover over the info icons and menus on your page with the mouse and press Escape — the popover should close.
- Move the mouse from the trigger onto the popover itself — it must stay open while you do.
- Remove timers that automatically close popovers after a few seconds.
- Prefer click over mouse contact as the trigger — whatever opens and closes on click meets the rules almost automatically.
- Ask your agency to use proven, accessible off-the-shelf components for submenus and tooltips instead of custom builds.
FAQ
What is a tooltip on a website?
A small popover that shows additional information when the visitor hovers over an element with the mouse or reaches it with the keyboard — such as the explanation behind an info icon in a form. For all visitors to be able to use it, it must be dismissible, reachable, and persistent.
Why do popovers especially bother people using screen magnification?
Anyone zoomed in heavily only sees a small portion of the page. A popover there can quickly cover exactly the text currently being read. If it can't be closed by keyboard, or disappears when trying to reach it with the mouse, the page becomes unusable at that spot.
How does the audit service check tooltips and popovers?
The measurement engine performs passive interactions in a real browser and observes the page's behaviour, such as while keyboard focus moves through it. The complete judgment on the dismissibility, reachability, and persistence of every popover is made at the Gold Standard level by a human, who operates the elements with mouse and keyboard and documents findings.