In reply to Justin Tadlock.

Some screen readers read the title attributes automatically, some require that the option be enabled, and some don't even support it at all, so there's no way to know for sure what experience a user will have. Either way, it looks like we're on the same page ;)

I suspected the SEO reference was a joke, but I also thought it had some real merit to it. I just did a quick search to see if maybe the article we want already exists, and I found a few interesting things:

Think that you can simply add descriptive text to your "click here" link's title attribute? Think again. Back in the 1990s I too thought these were the bee's knees. Turns out they are completely ignored by all major search engines. [...] They have nothing to do with Google.
-from 16 SEO Tactics That Will NOT Bring Targeted Google Visitors

In all of my testing scenarios, the title attribute do not seem to be picked up by Google and adding a link to that element did not seem to affect this result at all. If you really think about it, this makes complete sense. Since you can place title attributes in almost every element of a website, it would be very easy for a user to affect the search engines by keyword stuffing throughout their web pages, something that Google and the other major players do not want, hence why title attributes do not help with SEO.
-from Do Alt and Title Attributes Help With SEO?

They're both older articles, but somehow, I doubt things have regressed since then...