Hello Mike, "Option-Return" to download a file is indeed a Safari shortcut with a VoiceOver flavor. This is going to sound like the argument made in Steve's article, but you can find lists of Safari shortcuts by using the "Help" menu on the Safari menu bar. I'll list a few different ways you can find this kind of information and then I'll comment on what I mean by the "VoiceOver flavor", which allows us (and other Mac users who take advantage of "full keyboard access") to save a "click" action by pressing return.
Using your Help Menu • Navigate to an application's "Help" menu by pressing VO-M to move to the menu bar, then press "H" to move to "Help" and arrow down to the menu options. In some cases (e.g., iTunes) you may find a list of keyboard shortcuts or a "What's New" entry (e.g., for Mail) in addition to the main help document. • Arrow down to "Safari Help" and press return • You'll be in the toolbar of the Help menu, which will allow you to type a search query, and also has buttons to let you move backwards and forwards and access other help menus on your system. You can interact with the toolbar if you want to use these functions, or VO- Right arrow if you just want to the read through the Help information in the window after interacting there. • To search specifically for information about shortcuts, interact with your toolbar, then VO-Right arrow or tab to the search field. Tip: if you use tab you don't have to first interact with the toolbar, but you'll only hear currently active buttons, so if you're exploring the window and the toolbar for the first time, you might want to interact. (Actually, you can VO-Left arrow to reach this field immediately, since navigation in the tool bar wraps, but the first time I use applications or windows I explore what's there. Apart from buttons to move you backwards and forwards, there's a "Home" button that when pressed with VO-Space will take you back to the main Help page for the app from wherever you've navigated to in the contents. More interesting is the fact that if you explore the context menu for this button with VO-Shift-M, you'll access a menu of all help menus installed on your system, including the ones provided by third party apps. Pressing the "Menu" button with VO-Space accesses other functions like changing the font size, or the print menu to print the contents of the page in the window, so you can save the information as a PDF file, for example. I also forgot that if you're a low vision user you can first VO-left or right or use tab to move to the zoom button on the toolbar and press it with VO-Space to expand the help window to the whole screen before you interact with the toolbar. Or, at any time, you can use item chooser menu to look for "button".) • Assuming you have navigated to the search field in the toolbar, type in "shortcuts" (without the quotation marks) and press return. • The results of your search will show up in the main help area. Interact to read and select the search results. You'll find that your search for "shortcuts" has resulted in 6 help topics and 10 support articles from Apple's web pages that are listed in order of relevancy. I think that the first two items in each category answer you question. Uhder "Help Topics" these are: 1. Full keyboard access shortcuts 2. Safari shortcuts and under "Support Articles" these are: 1. Safari: Common Shortcuts 2. Safari: Browser Window and Menu Shortcuts You can VO-Down arrow and press return to read any of these. I typically use VO-Down arrow instead of VO-Right arrow here, because I don't need to hear the search "relevancy" announced, but that information can be useful if you're doing a difficult search and wondering which of a number of documents to try reading first. You can press the "Delete" key to move back and reach the search results page, or you can move back to the toolbar to use more navigation options. Control-F5 is a useful (non-VoiceOver) Mac shortcut if you want to do this, since you don't have to interact with the toolbar. Also, there's a button for "Index" in the main help window, and once you move away from the home page for that application's help menu there is also a button for "Home". You can press "Index" and look for "shortcuts". The main differences in using the "Index" are that your results will appear in alphabetical rather than relevancy order and will be limited to the "Help" document. Remember to interact with the HTML content in the help window. If you want to save this information, navigate to the toolbar (Control- F5), tab to the menu button and press (VO-Space), press "P" to go the print option and return. VO-Right arrow, tab, or use item chooser menu to navigate to the "PDF Menu" button and press (VO-Space). I usually arrow down to "Save as PDF", then fill in the file name I want to save as in the dialog window. Then, if it's something I want to learn, I'll open the file (which comes up in Preview) and I'll create a Bookmark to the document (Command-D -- just like the shortcut for creating a bookmark in Safari) and type in a name in response to the dialog window. The beauty of this method is that when you access the "Bookmarks" menu on Preview's menu bar and find your bookmark, your PDF document will automatically be opened up in Preview at whatever page you bookmarked -- you don't even have to know where you saved the document or what it's name was, or how to navigate to it. It's a great way to learn things that are in the VoiceOver Getting Started Guides. For example, I bookmarked the section on NumPad Commander in the Leopard guide, because I don't usually use this since I have a laptop keyboard, but wanted to learn this with an attached numeric keypad -- and incidentally, do you know that you can use a free NumberKey Free app on the iPhone 3GS or iPod Touch to run NumPad Commander for a laptop? The only issue about bookmarking in Preview is that the bookmarks don't support folder structure, but are listed alphabetically, so if you want to group them by document, as one guy who was learning about Logic Pro wanted to do, I'd add a prefix like "Logic:" or "LP:" to the beginning of the name. Using Google Searches: Nowadays, I usually do a Google search to find information on shortcuts. If I want to find the Apple Support documents I'll go to the Google toolbar on Safari using Command-Option-F (the first of the listed Safari Shortcuts in one of the Help results), type in "support Safari shortcuts" and press return. The first result is the Apple Support Document, "Safari: Common Shortcuts", that showed up under my Help window search. I use Command-L to highlight the address location, Command-C to copy it, and then Command-Tab to switch back to this mail window, where I can paste in the URL with Command-V: * Safari: Common Shortcuts http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=42950 • Safari: Browser Window and Menu Shortcuts http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=42951 (Actually, the Google result order changed between yesterday and today, but both documents were easy to find). The reason I now prefer Google searches is that you can sometimes find undocumented shortcuts or sources of information that someone has reported. The great thing about this method is that you're drawing on a hugely larger knowledge base and can directly apply it to working with your Mac and VoiceOver. For example, in doing this search, I came across an article that pointed out that there's a great source of Safari shortcuts information under the Safari application resources folder, and you can access it if you point your browser to: file:///Applications/Safari.app/Contents/Resources/Shortcuts.html (If you want to find this via Finder, use Comand-Shift A to go to the Applications folder, press "S" to go to Safari, interact and bring up the contextual menu (VO-Shift-M). Then choose "Show package contents" to display the "Contents" folder for the app. You can expand the folder with VO-Backslash and navigate down to the "Resources" folder to find the "Shortcuts.html" file. I think that summary may be even better than the other results pages). OK, to conclude, since this has gotten to be a bit longwinded. If you look under the browser shortcuts in this last resource, or under the Safari: Browser Window and Menu Shortcuts support document, you'll see that "Option-click a link" causes a file to download. But if you read the "Full Keyboard Access Shortcuts" information under help, you'll realize that VoiceOver automatically highlights a link when you navigate to it. So you don't need to route your mouse cursor here or "click" with your trackpad or mouse to activate the link and the download command -- you just need to press return to execute the command. That's what I meant by the "VoiceOver flavor". It's not specific to VoiceOver users, but it's a selection option that's automatically built into our system. Similarly, if you had opened a link to start playing an mp3 file or start displaying a PDF file and you realize that you wanted to download instead (maybe because the file is larger than expected or you didn't know that the link would activate a download), you can navigate to the link location in the address bar with Command-L, and press Option-Return to download the file instead. That works for everybody (not just VoiceOver users, I think), because Command-L highlights the current address location and pressing return after pressing the Option key activates the highlighted link. HTH. P.S. These explanations take far longer to type than it takes to run the actual searches with all the built-in Mac shortcut keys. As a second tip, periodically look through the options listed under the menus on your Application menu bar. The ones that have shortcut keys may be worth exploring, because that indicates that some people use that often enough to warrant assigning a system shortcut. That's a great way to learn about new features you didn't even know you wanted. That's the way I found out about "Command-Shift-Y" in mail to add the sender of the current mail message to my address book. Cheers, Esther. Michael Busboom wrote: > > Hello Esther, > > Although I read the Braille Monitor article, I learned something new > by > reading your posting anyway. > > You wrote: > "You can alternatively go to the table of contents for the latest > Braille Monitor at: > > http://www.nfb.org/images/nfb/Publications/bm/bm09/bm0909/bm0909tc.htm > > Then use item chooser menu to look for "A Second Look at Apple's > VoiceOver", VO-RIght arrow to the "Listen Now" link, and press Option- > Return to download the mp3 file." > > Where does one learn about commands such as the Option-Return? To my > knowledge, this is not a VO command, so I am assuming it is a Safari > command.; Is there a list of Safari keyboard commands that can > easily be > downloaded? > > Thanks, > > Mike > > -----Original Message----- > From: macvisionaries@googlegroups.com > [mailto:macvisionar...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Esther > Sent: Sunday, 04 October, 2009 00:11 > To: macvisionaries@googlegroups.com > Subject: Re: Latest article on using the Mac from the Braille Monitor > > > Thanks, Rich, for posting this link to the Braille Monitor. For those > of you who have not yet read the article, The Braille Monitor invited > a commentary on the original article from a Mac user (who is a member > of this list, and who some of you may recognize as the host of the > ATMaine access technology podcasts and from his appearances on the > Mac- > cessibility and Screenless Switcher podcasts). It's well written, and > you can also download the mp3 version of the article. > > The direct link to the mp3 file, which may be too long to use from > mail, is: > > https://www.nfb.org/images/nfb/Audio/Braille_Monitor/2009/October/07_A_Secon > d_Look_At_Apples_Voiceover.mp3 > > You can alternatively go to the table of contents for the latest > Braille Monitor at: > > http://www.nfb.org/images/nfb/Publications/bm/bm09/bm0909/bm0909tc.htm > > Then use item chooser menu to look for "A Second Look at Apple's > VoiceOver", VO-RIght arrow to the "Listen Now" link, and press Option- > Return to download the mp3 file. > > Cheers, > > Esther > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. 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