How to suppress popping-up of alt tooltip for an AREA tag?

I am using an image map which contains a lot of <area> tags. I have alt attributes for each of the area which gets popped up as a tooltip in IE. Can we suppress this behavior? I tried using empty title attribute but it did not work.

Edit: I need the alt attribute for other screen readers. So i cannot just make it empty ir remove it. I just want to supress its popping up behavior in IE. am

Solution

Check if the browser is IE using navigator.appName etc. (unreliable).

If it is IE, remove all alt attributes of the <area> tags (not tested):

var area_tags = document.getElementsByTagName("area");
for (var i = area_tags.length-1; i >= 0; -- i)
  area_tags[i].removeAttribute("alt");

Or just don't care.