[stuart78]

A while back I had to install a bluetooth mouse on a Mac mini with out existing mouse attached. It was a nightmare only reserved after lots of searching on my phone to enable the accessibility mode setting allowing arrow-based mouse movement.

The System Settings app seemed so incredibly hostile to keyboard navigation. I was able to start it, but tab only moves you in and out of the search window. From there, you can search for Bluetooth, but there seems no way to move from the left-hand menu tab the main contents. Within the main window, there are no buttons unless you hover with... a mouse, and no way to traverse the list via keyboard.

It'd be great to bring back some basic standards for how tab and arrow keys should aid in situations like this. I don't need them all the time, but they'd have saved me a real headache had they been there then.

[xp84]

Thing is, Apple has no standards for keyboard navigation of native UIs to bring back, except if you turn on the accessibility feature I think called “Full Keyboard Access” which is supposed to let you tab to any control instead of only text fields.

The Mac once had zero ability to navigate a dialog without a mouse, other than Enter/Return to do the default button, and Cmd-period (later ESC once it appeared) for cancel). The original Mac also famously had no arrow keys because they were worried developers, if given arrows, would build (or port over) apps that were keyboard-first or which underused the mouse, and they needed the mouse to be a first-class citizen to make the platform truly differentiated.

Windows by contrast started out mouse-optional, so it never lost the keyboard functionality - it’s deeply rooted in the interface’s DNA.

[swiftcoder]

> Thing is, Apple has no standards for keyboard navigation of native UIs to bring back

Huh? All menus and dialogs on Mac are navigable by keyboard. I don't recall a time when they weren't.

Unfortunately none of the necessary keyboard shortcuts are actually called out in the UI (we long for the days of Keys! on OS9)

[xp84]

Navigable by keyboard by default? In Windows you hold down Alt and letters start being underlined so you can use the menus. On a Mac, assuming I haven't turned on any a11y features, how do I open and peruse the menus or, just as importantly in the modern era, navigate the random buttons every app has strewn around the top part of windows where the title bar used to be? e.g. in Messages there's a "New chat" button, a "Video Camera" button, and an "(i)" button in that top bar. Some might have direct keyboard shortcuts a user could have memorized like ⌘-N for New, but that's not what I'm asking. I'm asking how you navigate the UI widgets themselves.

Also, dialogs? Open TextEdit. Hit ⌘-O for Open. Hit Tab. For me, default settings, that focuses the Search field. It doesn't visibly move the focus to any other control. After screwing with it for a while, it seems like if you hit Tab two times, nothing appears focused, but then if you use Up/Down arrows at that point, they are now able to select items on the sidebar, then another Tab moves focus to the main file browser, and from there the Search again, and now focus cycles between those three. But there's still no way to access any of the widgets up top. So, it's half-assed and undiscoverable.

[cryo32]

Apple UI is dire for keyboard. Never been able to drive it.

Windows is regressing as well. Some of the modern UI stuff is impossible. Think it was good around windows 7 era and that was it.