Category: Geeks r Us
I have a blind friend who was telling me there are a lot of focus problems on his Mac. We don't know what is VoiceOver and what is the Mac, and if there is a setting to change this.
In general, what happens is any time you dismiss an action, set focus on an application, or exit a dialog, the focus never really goes back to the client area. Like your list in Finder or iTunes, or the text area in Text Edit or other applications. you have to do, he says, what amounts to a tab and shift tab to get the focus into the area again.
He has VoiceOver set to follow focus, and is a reasonably sophisticated VoiceOver user including having written Apple Scripts, and is a Windows developer. So this is not a neophyte. But this is a big source of frustration to him, and by the sounds of it, sounds like maybe there is a system-wide setting he could set so that keyboard automatically finds focus in applications.
I understand there are quite a few people on here who use the Mac on a very regular basis for a great many things, so I'm guessing you have solved this. One can only hope someone remembers how.
Thanks for any answers,
Leo
Hi Leo,
Your friend might want to experiment with the options in the Navigation section
of the Voiceover utility, accessed by pressing control option f8. You say that he
has set the Voiceover cursor to follow focus, but there are various cursor options
in there that may be relevant. In particular, you can set the initial position of
the Voiceover cursor, which I have set to 'keyboard focused item', the other
setting is 'first item in window'. I'd advise your friend to play around in there
and see if the situation improves. He might want to make a note of the current
settings in case he wants to revert.