I never understood why the visually hidden has not been incorporated into the CSS standard proper (something like display: visually-none). Instead the standard is effectively recommending authors use a hack to do what is a very common pattern.

It's a hack either way. Screen readers really should support the title attribute like they do for image links; or maybe HTML should have had an alt attribute for <a href> as well.

When using a mouse pointer, you also want that information as a tooltip.