Enable Full keyboard Access on the Mac

0:02
In this video, we’re going to look at how we can enable full keyboard access on the Mac. And while we may want to enable full keyboard access, actually, this is one of my favorite tricks to do. I use this on a daily basis full keyboard access. Let’s see why. Let’s go to my Mac.

0:20
Let’s go and open up my System Preferences. So I go up to the Apple menu here. And then we go over to our System Preferences.

0:30
When you open up the System Preferences, what happens is your cursor or the focus, I should say, goes over to search. This is why that is blue. If we look in, you’re gonna see that the cursor is blinking, it’s waiting for me to search for something. This is what we call the focus, what we can do is we can move that focus to other areas and our screen, this is how we navigate, we can do this with the keyboard. So as an example, let’s say I wanted to open up my general preferences. So what I would need to do is I would need to move that focus there over to General, well, this is what we can do when we use full keyboard access. Now we have a couple of different ways to do this, I’m going to go over to my keyboard settings, this is the way that I usually do it. So I select keyboard here. And then what we need to do is go over to shortcuts. Under shortcuts, you’re going to see use keyboard navigation. This is what we want to turn on. When I turn this on, what I’m able to do is move that focus there using the keyboard, I no longer have to use a mouse or a trackpad, the way that I do that is with the Tab key. So now let’s go back over to all of my preferences here, we can see that my focus is in search. When I hit the Tab key, watch what happens, that focus is going to move, we can now see it as around the apple id see a light blue line around it. Let’s go and hit the tab key again, and watch Family Sharing here you’re gonna see that that focus is going to move, I’m gonna hit the tab key.

2:08
And now we can see that focus is there. When I hit the tab key again, what it’s going to do is go over to General here, I hit the Tab key, and now it’s under General. So basically, as I hit the Tab key, if you look at my preference panes here, that focus is moving. If I use Shift Tab, it moves backwards.

2:28
So I am navigating my screen, my Mac using my keyboard. Now let’s say I wanted to open up general here, this is what the focus is on. Now what I do is I use the spacebar, so it’s tab and Spacebar Tab to move the focus, spacebar to perform the action or open it. So I’m going to tap on the spacebar. And now we can see it moved in to the general preferences.

2:56
I’m going to hit the tab key you watch what happens, you can see that that focus is moving.

3:02
And if I want to turn any of these on, what I do is I hit the spacebar so we can see that it is on this checkbox here, I hit the spacebar, it turns it on, hit the spacebar again, it turns it off. When we have a menu that pops up, we can see that it is on this recent items here. When I tap the spacebar, I’m able to select how many recent items I want in there. So again, I do not have to necessarily use the trackpad or the mouse to navigate around our screen.

3:34
Now I mentioned that there are a couple of different ways to do this, we can see that this is a little bit subtle. This is actually the way that I like it. But if we go to our accessibility settings, we can make this a little bit more bold so we can see it easier. So I’m going to go back over to my general settings. And then we go over to keyboard.

3:52
Under keyboard, we’re going to go to our shortcuts here. And we’re going to turn this off, we’re not going to use this method. Now what I do is I go back over to my accessibility here. When I swipe up, we have keyboard, this is where I want to go. So I select this. And now what I do is I enable full keyboard access. And with this method, we actually have a little instruction here. To show help, we use Tab H to move forward we use tap just like we did before it’s going to move that focus to move backward shift tap. If we want to activate anything, open anything up, activate a menu, we use the spacebar. So I’m going to turn it on. And let’s go back to all of our System Preferences. And now we can see

4:38
a blue line there are blue square, so it makes it a little bit more bold. We also have a little bit more options with the controls, it’s going to select a few more items. So now watch what happens when I hit the tab key. It’s just rotating around

4:52
and we can easily see it it’s a little thicker blue line. So now if I want to open up accessibility, we can see that it has

5:00
overtop of accessibility here, all I have to do is just tap the spacebar, and it opens up accessibility. Where’s the focus right now? Well, since I’m using the accessibility option for this, we can easily see it’s up in their search bar here.

5:17
I tab, and we can see it as moving around. So now I want to select viewer here. All I have to do is just hit the spacebar goes to viewer, I want to go back over to navigation, Shift Tab, spacebar navigation.

5:34
It also works with other apps. I’m going to open up Safari here as an example.

5:41
We can see immediately up at the top, we have my sidebar here, that is selected. So if I want to show my sidebar, all I have to do is just hit the spacebar and I show my sidebar, hit the spacebar again, it closes it, when I tap, I can go to my URL here, I can go and add a new tab, I can view all of my open tabs, tap on the spacebar. There they all are right now to set for search. So I just type in a search. If I want to select any one of my tabs, all I have to do is just hit the tab key.

6:19
I want to create a new page, we can see that the plus is highlighted here. And now I just tap the spacebar

6:26
and we created a new page. And again, I’m doing this without touching the trackpad without touching the mouse. So that’s how we can enable full keyboard access on the Mac. And while we may want to enable full keyboard access, I actually do enable it. What I do is I use the more subtle method, I go back over to my System Preferences, this is what I’ll set up. I’ll turn off the accessibility option here.

6:52
Go to keyboard. I’ll turn this off, and then I’ll use the keyboard option here. We go over to shortcuts and I turn it on down here it’s a little bit more subtle. Now when I hit the Tab key,

7:05
we can see that the lines are not as blue not as bold, makes it a little bit more subtle. So that’s how we can enable full keyboard access and why we may want to on the Mac