Hi Krister, On Jan 27, 2011, at 00:27, Krister Ekstrom wrote:
> Hi folks. > I have a friend whom i try to help as good as i can with her new Imac and she > encountered a problem where the arrow keys did not move the cursor. It turned > out that she had by mistake pressed the key combination fn+f3. I tried the > exact same key combination and lo and behold my cursor seemed to get stuck on > an element and no matter how i moved the cursor keys around i didn't get any > response so i wonder, what exactly is fn+f3 for? You've hit the dedicated Exposé key, and from a VoiceOver user's standpoint, the only thing you want to do is press Fn+F3 again to get out of Exposé, which is not usable by any visually impaired user. Exposé is a visual analog to the window chooser menu you use with VO+F2+F2. Instead of presenting you the window choices in a list view, it presents you with an icon view display of the windows on your Desktop, and waits for you to move your cursor to one of these to click and select your window. From your point of view, VoiceOver has just become unresponsive, and will remain so until you leave this mode by pressing the same keys again. You'll find similar behavior pressing F9, F10, and F11 (dedicated Exposé keys) if you have not turned off these functions. They differ only in whether they display "All (currently open) windows" (F9, same as F3), "All windows of the currently active application" (F10), or show you just the Desktop cleared of foreground windows (F11). There's a long description of Exposé and step by step instructions on how to disable the key action in the archives. The subject also comes up when users want to re-assign the F9, F10, and F11 keys for use in Windows under VMWare Fusion. Here's the link: http://www.mail-archive.com/macvisionaries%40googlegroups.com/msg08197.html ("What is Exposé, and how to use its assigned keys in Fusion?") I'll just briefly summarize here that the F9 through F11 Exposé keys can be disabled under System Preferences either by going to the "Exposé & Spaces" menu and changing the key assignments (VO-Space on the pop up button) from F9, F10, and F11 to "-", which disables them, or by going to the "Keyboard" menu and on the "Keyboard Shortcuts" pane, select "Exposé & Spaces" in the table of shortcuts categories, then navigate to the table of shortcuts and use VO-Space to uncheck the box for "Exposé". (The only difference is that the "Exposé & Spaces" menu contains a one line description of what Exposé does.) It's also even worse if you press the shift key together with one of these keys, because then the windows move into their icon view mode in slow motion. Remember that you may see this behavior for combinations with "F3" (instead of Fn+F3) and "Fn+F9", etc. (instead of "F9") depending on whether your keyboard options in System Preferences have box checked for "Use all F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys. When this option is selected, press the Fn key to use the special features printed on each key." Scott Howell probably remembers this discussion from the mac-access list of a few years ago when people were wondering why some of these key combinations appeared to stop VoiceOver working. I've previously written to accessibil...@apple.com to suggest that the Exposé keys should probably default to being disabled for VoiceOver users. HTH. Cheers, Esther -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en.
