Originally Posted by hamidof

That has nothing to do with a tooltip, I say it's just a little popup that shows what the image ALT tag is. Tooltip is way more general than that.

Perform a Google search on tooltip. From the first result (Wikipedia), "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 supplementary information regarding the item being hovered over."

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Also I always see them poping up in my IE, FireFox and Opera, so I guess all the giant browser coders got the point *incorrectly*.

My comment was correct as written. You will not see alt text displayed in tooltips using recent versions of Firefox, Opera, Mozilla, Safari, Netscape, Konqueror, or Camino. Each one of these browsers will display the contents of the title attribute in a tooltip however. This link will be helpful: Why doesn’t Mozilla display my alt tooltips?.
Another good resource: The Alt and Title Attributes.

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Basically same stuff as Tess said

My intent was to clarify the difference between describing an image and providing a textual equivalent for it. Authors often have trouble with that concept.

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BTW, how exactly using ALT tags correctly helps me reach a larger audience?

If you use accessibility features according to specification, your content will be available to a wider range of visitors and web access devices. That makes good business sense, doesn't it?

HTH,
CK