Hi Michael, Mouse Keys are designed so that people with fine motor control disabilities can perform actions, such as clicking or moving the mouse, with precision. I've only used it with VoiceOver in a few situations. The first is when a physical mouse click with trackpad or cursor is required. The VO-Shift-Space shortcut is a simulated mouse click implemented by software. The VO-Space shortcut is another software defined shortcut that performs the default action -- which could be pressing a button, clicking on link, selecting a menu option, etc. depending on context. There are some instances, especially in situations where applications are not fully accessible or are transitioning in accessibility with VoiceOver, where these kinds of "software" clicks do not work, and you have to physically click your trackpad or mouse for your click to take effect. In these instances, performing a click with "Mouse Keys" mode turned on is equivalent to physically clicking with mouse or trackpad. The NumPad Commander keyboard shortcut for a key click, which David Griffith informs me in another post is Control+"5" on the numeric keypad in Lion, will also always work as a "hardware" click. (This used to be just the unmodified "5" key on the numeric keypad of a full-size keyboard in Leopard, but in Snow Leopard and Lion this was switched from "Clicks the mouse" to "Perform action for item", and clicking the mouse required pressing the Control key together with the "5" key on the NumPad. Now that I think about it, the ability to use VO-Shift-Space to double-click on the splitter in mail to hide the Preview pane in the message viewer window also went away when we moved from Leopard to Snow Leopard.)
In addition to allowing users to click a mouse or trackpad without moving the position of the mouse pointer, Mouse Keys mode lets you move the mouse pointer position on the screen in pixel increments by using key strokes. So the second circumstance in which I've used Mouse Keys is for instances when I need to move the mouse pointer to locations that VoiceOver doesn't navigate to, in order to click on controls. The most common example of this usage is when trying to deal with flash controls on a web page. VoiceOver can't "see" these controls, in the sense that you can't use VoiceOver commands to navigate to them, since Adobe's Flash does not comply with Apple's accessibility API. However, if you manage to move your mouse pointer over a flash control independently of using VoiceOver's cursor, because you've turned cursor tracking off (with VO-Shift-F3), VoiceOver can tell you what is under your mouse pointer (with VO-F5, or by checking the box for "Speak text under mouse after delay" in the "Announcements" tab of "Verbosity" in VoiceOver Utility) and will even describe the screen coordinate location of your mouse pointer (VO-F5-F5 or VO-F5-F5-F5). So the way I used to play the Audible audio book sound samples before they changed their web pages from Flash only to HTML 5 versions was by navigating to "Sample" with VoiceOver, then turning keyboard tracking off, and Mouse Keys on, and moving the mouse pointer 50 pixels to the left of "Sample" so that the player control was under the mouse pointer. Then I would click to start the sample playing. On extended keyboards, Mouse Keys uses the numeric keypad, with the central "5" key to designate the current position of the mouse. To move the mouse pointer 1 pixel to the left, you press the key the left of the "5" key once, and similarly if you want to move to the right, up, down. or diagonally. You use the nine number keys (1-9, with 5 in the central position), to move your cursor, pixel by pixel. On a laptop keyboard, the keys you use are where the embedded numeric keypad used to be -- surrounding the "i" key. So "j k l" was "1 2 3", "u i o" was "4 5 6", and "7 8 9" (on the top row of number keys) was "7 8 9". To move to the left I tap the "u" key with Mouse Keys on. To move to the right I tap the "o" key. And to click my "mouse" I tap the "i" key when Mouse Keys are turned on. Note that you can also move your mouse pointer using the trackpad (when TrackPad Commander in turned off) if cursor tracking is turned off. If you have the box checked for "Speak text under mouse after delay" in the "Announcements" tab of "Verbosity" in VoiceOver Utility, you'll also be told what is under the mouse. (You may want to adjust the slider to make the time delay short). This does not require using Mouse Keys at all. In Snow Leopard, we could use this method to navigate to icons for Dropbox, etc. on the status menu bar that VoiceOver didn't see, by moving the mouse pointer using the trackpad along the top edge of the screen, if cursor tracking were turned off. Then you could click on those icons once VoiceOver announced you were on top of them to open the menus. (I used to use Mouse Keys to get a feel for the distance between icons -- usually 30 pixels separation.) I haven't been able to navigate this way in Lion. I think Ray mentioned being able to do this, but I couldn't make things work. As I said, this doesn't require Mouse Keys, although you could also do this with Mouse Keys in Snow Leopard by moving to the first item VoiceOver recognized in the Status menu bar (VO-M-M or Control-F8), and then using Mouse Keys to move your mouse pointer to the left, typically 30 pixels to the first icon. There were also different methods of moving to the status menu bar -- some used "Mouse the Cursor moves VoiceOver Cursor" setting for navigation, and others had mouse cursor ignoring the VoiceOver cursor. The first setting is something I may use for apps with transitioning accessibility, but there are often stability consequences for using this navigation setting in general. HTH. If you want to read more about this topic and about mouse keys, here are two links to old archived posts from 2009 and 2008: • "Re: Listening to Audible dot com samples" http://www.mail-archive.com/macvisionaries%40googlegroups.com/msg11128.html • "Re: Here's how to play samples on Audible.com with VoiceOver" http://www.mail-archive.com/discuss%40macvisionaries.com/msg40306.html Cheers, Esther On Apr 16, 2012, at 6:44 AM, Michael Malarsie wrote: > Greetings! > So I had never checked out the mouse keys before. I have enabled it but > haven't had a lot of time to play with it. > Can anyone share some of the basics with me? thanks ya'll! > > Mike Malarsie > > -- > 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. > -- 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.
