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Full keyboard access and Finder shortcuts

Submitted by Merlin on September 16, 2004 - 1:58am.

Depending on how and how much you like to use your keyboard for getting around, you might consider going to “System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Keyboard Shortcuts” and enabling “Turn on full keyboard access”. Among many things, this lets you tab through drop down menus on web pages. (You’d already given up all hope, hadn’t you?)

That “Keyboard Shortcuts” tab is also the place to enable or re-assign a bunch of key commands you may not know were even available in the Finder (did you know you can jump to the Dock using your keyboard?).

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If you use Firefox, you'll...

Submitted by Jacob (not verified) on September 16, 2004 - 4:05am.

If you use Firefox, you’ll be frustrated to learn that it doesn’t honor this setting; making Firefox allow tabbing to all form elements is less than intuitive – but it can be done! The short version is that you have to set “accessibility.tabindex” to “7”; the long version can be found at http://sidesh0w.com/weblog/2004/09/01/tabindex_osx_firefox/.

By the way – setting this setting to 7 will allow tabbing to every form item and every link. if you just want to tab to form items (and not links), set the value to 3.