Hello David, Option+Return on a link to force downloading is actually a Mac OS X shortcut with a VoiceOver twist to it. Mac users, whether visually impaired or not, can use Option+Click on a link to force downloading of a file. But if the link is highlighted, pressing the Return key together with the Option key will force the download. VoiceOver automatically highlights the link when you navigate to it. This also means that if you open a link and start playing an mp3 file, for example, that you wanted to download or find that a PDF file that you wanted to download is being displayed in the web page, you can press Command+L to move to the address bar of your browser, which will also highlight the address there, and press Option+Return to force downloading. That last tip works for all Mac OS X users -- it does not depend on VoiceOver at all. There's a long post in the archives from three years ago where a discussion about an article in the Braille Monitor on VoiceOver led to a side discussion about this shortcut and how to learn other shortcuts for your Mac.
You also said in an earlier post: And Text Edit is too convoluted for what I want it to do. If I want to to just copy the text in a webpage in windows, then I will just select what I want and then paste it into notepad. If I do this in Text Edit then it inserts all the formatting of the page including links, making it impossible to just save as a text file. TextEdit supports either plain text or rich text format. You can select the default format that you use for new documents in your preferences. If you are using the default settings, this will be rich text format. However, if you have copied and pasted your selection into TextEdit and want this to be plain text, just use the shortcut Command-Shift-T to make this a plain text document and remove links, etc. You'll be prompted in a dialog window whether you want to make the document plain text, since you will lose information on text styles like fonts and colors, images, attachments, and document properties. If you want to continue with the conversion, press the "OK" button. If not, press cancel. To speed this up, pressing Return always chooses the default selection (here it's "OK") and pressing the escape key always cancels the action. The Command-Shift-T shortcut is a toggle action to change between rich text and plain text formats: you can use the same shortcut to change a plain text document to rich text format. So if you create a new document with the Command-N shortcut, and you want it to be plain text, you can then press Command-Shift-T. Alternatively, if you want most of your new documents to be plain text, change your default preferences. Press Command-comma to bring up preferences in TextEdit. You should be in the "New Document" tab. Then navigate to the format options and select the radio button for plain text with VO-Space. Close the window with Command-W. Now when you create a new document it will default to being plain text, and if you want it to be rich text format you can use Command-Shift-T. Finally, there's a neat way of sending selections to TextEdit that I use, which is a Service menu option called "New TextEdit window containing selection". You can activate this option by going to your Services Preferences. This is actually a selection under the Keyboard shortcuts tab under the Keyboard menu of System Preferences, but there's a fast way to get there. Here are the instructions. (I'm still using Lion, but it shouldn't make a difference). 1. Navigate to Services Preferences via your menu bar 1a. Use either VO-M or Control-F2 to go to the Apple Menu 1b. Right arrow to your application (TextEdit, Mail, etc --- note: you can get to your services setup starting from any application) 1c. Arrow down then press "s" to select the "Services" menu option and press Return 1d. Arrow down the Services submenu to "Services Preferences…" and press Return (Since "Services Preferences…" is always the last item in the submenu, a quick way to get there is to press Command-Down arrow, and then press Return) 2. You're now in the "Keyboard" menu of System Preferences with the "Keyboard Shortcuts" tab selected and "Services" already selected in the "Shortcuts Categories" table. 2a. Press VO-Command-T twice to move to the second table for services options and interact (VO-Shift-Down arrow) 2b. Use item chooser menu (VO-I) and press "t e x", pause slightly, then press "n e w". You'll find an entry for "New TextEdit Menu from Selection". (Pausing slightly between the two sets of entries means that your results will first be filtered for matches to "tex", then those results will next be filtered for matches to "new". If you type both selections really fast you won't get the secondary filtering applied.) Press Return to go there. 2c. Navigate (VO-Left arrow) to the first column in the table and use VO-Space to check it. This item for sending your selection to TextEdit will now appear as an option in your "Services" submenu on your menu bar when select text in any application. 2d. However, an even easier way to use this option is to assign it a keyboard shortcut. I only do this for a few commands that I frequently use, because there are lots of built-in shortcut keys for the Mac, and I don't want to conflict with these assignments. If you want to assign a keyboard shortcut to this service, here's how. 3. Starting from the table of service menu options in the "Keyboard" menu of System Preferences on the "Keyboard Shortcuts" tab with "Services" selected in the "Shortcuts Categories" table (where you left off in 2a.) You have interacted with this table. 3a. Repeat 2b: Use item chooser menu (VO-I) and press "t e x", pause slightly, then press "n e w". Press Return on the entry for "New TextEdit Menu from Selection" to be taken to this column 2 entry in the table. 3b. Interact (VO-Shift-Down arrow) and then navigate (VO-Right arrow) to column 3. Route your mouse cursor to your VoiceOver cursor (VO-Command-F5) and double click with VO-Shift-Space by holding down the Control, Option, and Shift keys, and double tapping the space bar. Then type in the shortcut you want to assign. (I use Command-Option-Shift-W here.) 3c. Command-W to close the window. You're done. If you have set your TextEdit preferences for format to plain text, when you bring up a web page and press Command-A to select all, followed by your shortcut for "New TextEdit Window containing Selection" (e.g. Command-Option-Shift-W), a plain text window of the contents will pop up in TextEdit and VoiceOver immediately starts reading the dialog. If you want to go back to the web page use Command-Tab to switch applications. And of course, this service menu shortcut also works for any selected portions of a web page or document. The selection works anywhere -- you could select part of a formatted mail message, or a section of a document in Preview, and the service menu option will send this to TextEdit. The Services menu option is much more efficient than using simple copy and paste. It uses fewer system resources and doesn't require you to use the space on your clipboard and associated memory to copy selected text. (For those of you with linux or unix backgrounds, think of this as a kind of piped process.) Furthermore, it has accessibility advantages, because it strips out non-text characters and code. Although I'd posted previously a few times about this service menu option all the way back in Tiger in the old archived list -- some years before the macvisionaries list moved to Google Groups in early 2009 -- I believe the first post about this service menu option that people paid attention to was an instance where someone asked for a way to read some really horribly coded (from the point of accessibility) web page with a screen reader. Checking this service menu option (and also assigning a shortcut) meant that page could be read with two sets of keyboard keystrokes -- one for the selection and one to apply the service menu option. Because there are more ways of making web pages inaccessible than that simple type of bad coding (as we all know, especially a lot of new web pages that use AJAX, etc.), this shortcut won't solve all (or even most) of those problems. But it will work to let you automatically read embedded tables or lists in Word or Pages documents, for example. TextEdit is more powerful than notepad and can work quite simply when you become familiar with it, so try sticking with it a while longer and asking when you have questions. This post (and the instructions) could have been a lot shorter and simpler if I had left out the explanations, so the actual suggested steps really don't take long to implement. One final explanation: VO-Space is actually VoiceOver's shortcut to "perform the default" action in a given situation. That may not be the one that you want/expect (e.g. playing a linked MP3 file on the web instead of downloading it). 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.
