How do I view title text for a web page on a mobile device?

XKCD on my kindle or phone just doesn't cut it. I do all my other morning reading from the comfort of the ivory throne, but always have to revisit XKCD when I'm at a full blown computer with a mouse because I can't access the title text for the comic.

Is there any way to display the title text on a mobile device?

Solution 1:

It's not generally possible unless specifically supported in some way by your browser, but you can create bookmarklets in JavaScript that add image title text to the web page as regular text paragraphs. How well that works depends on the layout of the web page.

One possible implementation is the following as URL of a bookmark:

javascript:(function(){for(var i=0;i<document.images.length;i++){var t=document.createTextNode(document.images[i].title); document.images[i].parentNode.insertBefore(t, document.images[i].nextSibling);}})();

This will add the image title text just after every image on the web page. For XKCD, it looks like this:

It's not easy to type on iOS, but you can use iCloud to sync it between desktop and iOS device.

Solution 2:

Not easily without preparing a tool for the job - the title text from XKCD uses the mouse pointer and a hover timeout to present the title text as shown below:

<img src="http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/good_cop_dadaist_cop.png" title="NOW INVENT AN IMPOSSIBLE-TO-TRANSLATE LANGUAGE AND USE IT TO TELL US WHERE THE MONEY IS." alt="Good Cop, Dadaist Cop" />

On iOS in the mobile safari, there is no mouse pointer that exists to hover, so that information does not surface in the normal interface. You may be able to get at it using VoiceOver, but the learning curve and delay in turning that on or off makes it a very slow workaround.