Hi, I am developing a new site www.coffeeforroses.com with 3.7.13, and wordpress 3.8. Although the image alt tags show up in firebug, meaning the code is there, none of the images when hovered over actually display the alt tag text. The header images are in header widgets so that I can have different versions on each page, but the posts are just regular images and/or featured images. I checked a few of the sites in the showing off thread, and some of them have alt tags that aren't showing up as well. I use firefox, but checked IE and Safari as well. Thanks.

This is a WordPress issue

1) go do a google search on 'html img alt' and read what it does
2) The 'mouseover showing text', effect was deliberately removed from WP in version 3.5. See this thread
3) look for a plugin to resolve your issue

in the future you should alway swap to anther theme to see if the problem still exists, if it does you no it is not theme related
then disable all your plugins and see if it still exists. This will help you isolate where the problem is coming from.

Thanks, I was just going to post to say that I switched to Twenty Fourteen and noticed the same problem, then I saw your reply. That thread you mentioned is a bit confusing however, and I guess I'm not the only one confused by it. Will do as you suggested, thanks.

Maybe I'm not clear on what you want but to add text you will see on hover after you add an image just go into the image dialog by clicking on it and selecting the Edit Image Link. Then add a Title. Hovering over the image will show that title.

Larry (or anyone else reading this) the issue is when you add an image there is a field 'title' that you can fill in. Prior to WP 3.5, that was automatically added to the <img......> when you added an image to a post. However as of WP 3.5 that no longer happens. The 'title=...' will not be added to the <img...> HTML any more. There is a long thread of arguments in trac (see the link in post 2) you can read if you want.

So the title a.k.a. 'tooltips' will have to be manually added or via a plugin.

Yes, I knew that about the hover. The Alt tag, which was mentioned in the first post, is shown when the image can't be displayed for some reason and is not meant to show on hover.

I agree that if you want the title to be auto populated there may be a plugin. If you are looking for text for SEO purposes the alt tag should be fine.

Thank you Larry, now I get it. In order to display the little yellow box aka "tooltips" when I mouseover, I need to use title="text I want" tag instead of using the alt="text I want" tag, if I'm coding it myself, as in a widget. Otherwise, on a post or page, I edit the image and fill in the title field for the image. I tried it both in widgets and on a test page, it works, thanks! Thanks to both of you. Looking at my original post, maybe I wasn't clear enough, and now I know what the alt tag and title tags are really for.