VoiceOver cheatsheet
Installation / turning on
VoiceOver is part of OSX, no installation required. To turn it on and off, press cmd-F5.
If you are on a laptop with OSX Lion or older, you may need to press fn-cmd-F5
It works with Safari, support for other browsers is being worked on but I would stick with Safari.
Basics
The basic OSX keyboard short-cuts still work, VoiceOver uses a key-combination to add many more functions. These are called the VO keys.
VO keys are cntl (control) and alt (option). So pressing "VO - F5" means pressing cntl-alt-F5.
- Open VoiceOver utility
- VO-F8
- Stop speaking
- control
- Start/Quit
- cmd-F5
Navigation
VoiceOver has a concept of "Interacting with" items, including HTML documents. You can go into (interact with) pages, widgets, lists etc by pressing VO-shift-down arrow, and get out of them by pressing VO-shift-up arrow.
- Interact with an item
- VO-shift-Down Arrow
- Stop interacting with (exit) an item
- VO-shift-Up Arrow
- Perform default action on something (e.g. click)
- VO-Space
- Select a menu or list item
- VO-Enter
- Next
- VO-right Arrow
- Previous
- VO-right Arrow
- NB: You can also go up & down, but left & right are more likely to trace a normal path.
- Go to top
- VO-home (on laptop: VO-fn-left arrow)
- Read everything from here
- VO-A
Web rotor
The "web rotor" is used to list and move to page elements such as (ARIA) Landmarks, links, headings, form controls and web spots (within page bookmarks).
- Open web item rotor
- VO-u
- Move between items in menu:
- VO and left/right/up/down/enter.
Search commands
Use for finding things in applications and web pages, add shift to reverse direction:
- VO-f: find (text search)
- VO-cmd-x: list
- VO-cmd-t: table
- VO-cmd-l: link
- VO-cmd-h: heading
- VO-cmd-m: heading of the same level
- VO-cmd-p: next plain text
- VO-cmd-v: visited link
- VO-cmd-j: next control
- VO-cmd-g: graphic
More information
For more, please see the full user guide at http://www.apple.com/voiceover/info/guide/