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interactionsRauno

No Tooltips on Disabled Buttons

NEVER

NEVER: Put a tooltip on a `disabled` button — it cannot receive focus or hover reliably, so keyboard users never see it. Use `aria-disabled` plus visible explanation text instead.

Disabled buttons should not have tooltips — they are not accessible to keyboard users

Bad

Good

Why it matters

Disabled buttons cannot receive focus in the DOM, so keyboard users will never see the tooltip. Instead of hiding the reason behind an inaccessible tooltip, use aria-disabled with a visible explanation text so everyone can understand why the action is unavailable.

References

Built by Gleb Stroganov, design engineer at Evil Martians.

The rules come from other people's skills and guidelines — Vercel, Rauno Freiberg, @Ibelick, impeccable, Emil Kowalski, Tailwind, RAMS — each one credited on the Sources page. The work here is extraction and wiring: every rule is pulled into one corpus, given a good and a bad example you can operate, a MUST/SHOULD/NEVER rule an agent can paste, and a link back to where it came from.