Using Full Keyboard Access On Your Mac

Full Keyboard Access is a new Accessibility feature that aims to give you access to everything on your Mac using only the keyboard. In addition to buttons, links and other controls, you can work with Control Center, Notifications, the Menu Bar and Dock.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's take a look at the new Full Keyboard Access feature in macOS Monterey. 
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So a new Accessibility feature in macOS is called Full Keyboard Access. The idea here is to give access to everything on the screen using just your keyboard. Now through Keyboard Shortcuts and other techniques you already have access to most things using the keyboard without turning this on. This aims to kind of fill the gap so you have access to just about everything. But it's very new and it doesn't quite work as you would expect sometimes.
To turn it on you want to go into System Preferences and then go to Accessibility. Then scroll down to Keyboard. You'll see here under Navigation, Enable Full Keyboard Access. Let's look at the options first. So for Appearance options you have the number of seconds to Hide a Full Keyboard Access. You also can increase the size and contrast of the indicator. This is going to be the box surrounding things when you're selecting them. You can also set the color. You can also go here to see all these different commands. There are a lot of different ways to see these commands. You can see them here. You also can see some of them listed right here and, as we'll find out when you use the Tab H shortcut you can see all of them as well. Let's enable this.
So when I enable it now you can see there's a blue outline here around this control. As you can see a lot of the different commands involve the Tab key. So to move forward I use Tab. You can see how it jumped from here to there. I can continue to move forward using Tab and it will loop back around and you can see it winds up back here. Now inside this I can move around using the arrow keys here. So I can go up and down. You could see that the thing still selected, in this case, is keyboard. So if I want to switch to another selection I have to activated it using Space. So you could see now I'm in Pointer Control. I can go back up to Keyboard but to activate it, Space. So it's kind of like when you move the pointer with your mouse or trackpad over something that's not active. You actually have to click to go there. The same thing here. The arrow key is kind of like moving this Full Keyboard Access pointer over this other item, in this case Keyboard, and Space is kind of like clicking to select it.
Now when we use Tab H, and there are going to be some basic commands here and I can use the Arrow keys to having it up and down and to the right. So here are the basic commands. I can see under Movement here are the Movement commands. You can see a lot of these involve either Tab, or the Arrow keys, Tab and the Arrow keys to go to the beginning or end of groups, or Control Tab. Now I can go to Interaction and see here that to activate something I use a Space. Contextual Menu, that is Tab M so you have a way basically right click using Tab as a modifier key. That's something new. Then M will bring up the Context Menu. Other actions can be accomplished by using Tab Z. Then here we see Device. We'll see some special commands to get to various things that are really hard to get to with the keyboard. We'll look at these in a minute.
So here we are in the Finder. We can see the Group selected is the List of Files. I can use the arrow keys to move through it but it's important to realize I haven't selected anything. This light blue highlight here is part of Full Keyboard Access. It's not what's selected. To select something I need to use the Spacebar. Now I've selected it. Another thing to realize is that Full Keyboard Access relies heavily on the regular keyboard shortcuts. So just because you use Full Keyboard Access to select this item doesn't mean you should use anything special to actually do something with it. All of the regular keyboard shortcuts that you might use to, say, open this folder would apply here. So Command O is what opens the folder and Command Up Arrow is what goes up a level in the Finder. So it's important to master those keyboard shortcuts that are available all the time before using Full Keyboard Access to actually do things that you couldn't normally do.
Here I am in Safari and you could see part of the page has been selected. So I can now Tab through the various parts of the page and it's a little tricky. Sometimes you just have to keep tabbing through to see where you get. But once you have something selected you can actually click on it using the Spacebar. It's the same as clicking on that link. Then it's useful to know all of the regular Safari keyboard shortcuts. For instance Command Left square bracket is Back. Now if we want to right click or Control click on the item we can do Tab M and you could see now you're in the Context Menu and I can use the Arrow Keys to navigate through here to select something. Also you've got Tab Z will bring up Action. So Actions show you what's possible here. In this case I can Arrow Down to press and make it act like a click or show menu to make it act like a Control Click or right click. Use the Escape Key a lot while working with this to get out of those menus.
Now one of the things that you can do in Full Keyboard Access that is almost impossible to do elsewhere is access things like Notifications and Control Center. So for Notifications it's the fn or Globe Key and N. This will bring up Notifications and notice it has that blue outline around it. I can now Tab through the items here and actually use the Arrow keys inside of groups to access things. Let's Shift Tab back here to this Notification and I can now use Tab Z and it will bring up Actions and you'll see I can do Close or Press. So I'm going to Close that and it's the equivalent to clicking the X. Now you can also bring up the Control Center with the fn key and C. This will go to the Control Center. As far as I know this is the only way to access Control Center using the keyboard. Previously there was no way to do it at all. So now you can do this and Tab through the different groups. If I were to click on this it will turn Bluetooth Off, right. So normally what I would do is Control Click on it and if I'm unsure I can just use Tab Z and it will show details or press. So let's do Show Details. You can see now it digs down into Bluetooth. 
Now you can access the Menu Bar using Control and F2. In this case I need to use the fn key for F2 to not be the screen brightness key. So now that I'm in the Menu Bar I can use the Arrow keys to move around and down and select any menu item I want. If you want to access the Dock it's the fn key and A. This will access the Dock and you can move through the different items. You can even go up to select things that are in the Context Menu there.
A couple of other interesting things is one is you can use Mission Control with the keyboard this way. As far as I know there's no way to use Mission Control with just the keyboard before. Oh sure you can do Control Up Arrow to access it. You really need to use the mouse or trackpad and pointer to be able to do things. But now you can actually use Tab to go through the different items, and I've got some on the other screen here that eventually will loop back here to these. For instance if I wanted to go to this one I could use the spacebar. So I could Control Up Arrow, Tab over to the one that I want, and spacebar to jump to it.
Now if you have the window selected like I have the Finder selected here if I do Tab Z I'll see that there are no additional actions. So I'm not quite sure how you would use this to actually say move one thing to another desktop or go full screen or remove full screen.
So the bottom line here is that this is a really interesting and new feature and I hope it continues to evolve and work better in some cases. If you're someone who needs full keyboard access to your Mac then certainly it's an improvement over what was there before. In particular being able to access things like Control Center and Notification Center. It seems to me to be very difficult to use, to know when you should be using Tab or the Arrow Keys or space or some other keyboard command to get something done. Probably after a day or two I would get used to using it.
There is one last thing I want to show you. If you do Tab H for Help and you go down to Device, notice the last one is Pass-Through Mode. So Control Option Command P. So what this does is temporarily turns Off Full Screen Access. So you use that keyboard command and you have this indicator telling you that Pass-Through Mode is now On. So now that turns off Full Keyboard Access and gives you back regular control. This is a way to prevent Full Keyboard Access from getting in the way temporarily when you want to do something like use a complex app or game and then be able to quickly just turn it back on so that you have full keyboard access back again.
So if you just want to use this for something like say accessing Control Center with the keyboard you could have it on with Pass-Through Mode all the time and then if you want to access the Control Center you could quickly do Control Option Command P and then fn C to get to Control Center and then Tab to get to what you want. When you're done with Control Center you can just do Control Option Command P again and then Pass-through Mode is On again.
Now note that some of the new shortcuts actually work even if Full Keyboard Access is turned Off. For instance you could hold the fn or Globe key and then A and then the Dock will appear and you can use the Arrow keys to go back and forth and actually select something in the Dock with the Spacebar. You could also use the fn or Globe key and see to bring up Control Center. But with Full Keyboard Access turned Off there's really nothing you could do with it. You can look at it but you can't actually navigate with the Arrow keys or Tab key to do anything. The fn Globe key also works with the M key to go to the Menu Bar and here you actually can navigate. So this is the same as doing Control F2 or Control fn and F2 depending upon your keyboard settings. You get exactly the same result it's just a different keyboard shortcut that matches the one in Full Keyboard Access. You can use the fn or Globe key and N to bring up Notification Center. But like Control Center there's nothing you can do with it here. You can't navigate around with the Arrows or Tab. You can just bring it up. But that could be handy to quickly see some Notifications and then use the same thing to dismiss it.
So if you think this would be useful to you then give it a try. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 9 Responses to “Using Full Keyboard Access On Your Mac”

Razvan Mihai

3 years ago

Gary: Thanks for shedding light on the topic. I have experimented the other day with the Full Keyboard Access but found it a bit confusing. After watching your video, I will use the Fn-A and Fn-M to access the Menu Bar and the Dock instead of the default Fn-Ctrl-F2 and Fn-Ctrl-F3, which are discouraging key combinations.

On that note, do you use F1, F2, etc., as standard function keys in your set-up? What do you recommend?

Gary Rosenzweig

Razvan: It is a personal choice. If you use apps that like to use F1, F2, etc. for shortcuts then you probably like having them set that way. Otherwise, pressing FN to switch isn't that big of a deal.

Wayne D. Moore

Somehow I got this "Full Keyboard Access" turned on (without my trying to do so - maybe after Monterey upgrade). When I tried to enter data into a cell in Excel, the curser dropped down to one of the sheet fields, along with the blue box around a field. I also had an issue with a third-party site (GRO.UK) that would move things in an unexpected way. Microsoft Support was clueless as to any help. When I unchecked this field, everything went back to normal. Thought I'd share this fix.

nick

Gary: I can't find a description for this symbol between the quotes " ` " which is located in the same key as the tilde. Looks like an accent of some kind. Do you know what it is? thx

nick: Technically that is an accent mark ("grave") but in computer programming it is called the backtick character and is often used to quote special values, depending on the language. Like a = `this`.

Keit

Hello, I don't have that option in my macbook, I wonder if it is not available in Catalina? Thanks in advance.

Keit: It was there, but the options were in different places.

Ian

I tabbed into this page intending to read the text transcript, but I was trapped in the leave a new comment section.
I had full keyboard access set nearly 20 years ago, but recently (running Catalina, & Monterey) it has not been working fully.

Somehow it got turned off. Turning it on now in Monterey, and in Catalina, turned on the Dock ^[F3] (works) and Menu bar ^[F2] (not working, maybe after a restart??)

My "Magic" TrackPad is churning out sometimes rapid clicks independent of any manual touch, so my only mouse is currently on the other Mac.

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Using Full Keyboard Access On Your Mac

Comments: 9 Responses to “Using Full Keyboard Access On Your Mac”

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