Titles, tooltips, and accessibility

I'm working on a multilingual page and where other languages happen I add titles where appropriate like
<span lang="zh-Hant" title="flower in Chinese">花</span>
or
<dt title="Hangeul">Korean</dt>
. I was finding that the tooltips were taking almost 2 seconds to appear so I wanted to have a more instant notification that help was on the way. I considered colouring the text or add some other visual indicator and may still do that, but I found styling the cursor when the text is hovered like so
dt:hover[title]:hover, span[title]:hover, .emoticon:hover { cursor: help; }
works great for people using mice. What I have no idea, is how accessibility tools work with spans and if I should be adding :focus or :focus-within styles or ???. For that matter, I suppose that touch device users are also being left out. 8-( Is action needed for accessibility?
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