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In Mac 10.3 (Panther), keyboard navigation is missing for certain controls, such as switching TabFolder pages or selecting items in a Combo. Mac 10.4 (Tiger) promises full keyboard navigation. Need to test this.
Please make sure to enable "Full keyboard access" on the "Keyboard Shortcuts" tab on the "Keyboard & Mouse" System Preferences page (this is for Tiger, YMMV for Panther).
Something else to remember is that 'space bar' behaves in a similar manner to 'return' on Windows to activate certain controls when they have focus. For example, I tried dropping down a read-only combo using arrow, return, and first letter, with various combinations of control, alt, command - and nothing worked. Finally, I discovered that space dropped down the list, then the up/down arrows could be used after that.
Another tip from Andre: To move focus to the menu bar use Control-F2. One way to find these keyboard shortcuts is to go to the Keyboard Shortcuts page of the Keyboard & Mouse preference page in System Preferences.
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/OSXHIGuidelin es/XHIGKeyboardShortcuts/chapter_20_section_1.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP4000272 5-CHDIGFBH I know the URL is long, but here is a web page on Apple that lists of all the keyboard shortcuts.
A couple of bugs opened by Karice: bug 117335 - accessibility, Mac: cannot select checkboxes in trees, lists bug 117340 - accessibility, Mac: cannot access toolbars using keyboard
Closing this bug in favor of opening new bugs if there is a specific problem. In general, keyboard accessibility is quite good on OS X, from Tiger onward. If a control is not accessible using tab or arrow keys, then: 1) make sure to turn on full keyboard access (see comment 2) 2) if the control is still not keyboard accessible, then use VO keys to access it - almost all controls can be accessed in this way. Further info below. 3) if the control is still not accessible using VO keys, then open a bug. Further info on using VO keys: VO == VoiceOver, the Mac OS X screen reader, introduced in Tiger (10.4) The official manual is here: http://www.apple.com/accessibility/voiceover/manual.html A very nice and simple "guide to VoiceOver Basics" is here: http://alastairc.ac/notes/osx/voiceover/ And here is a very short "how to use VO keys for navigation" manual: - turn VoiceOver on using command+F5 (on laptops, might need fn+command+F5) - use control+option+arrow keys to navigate (VO highlights the item under the VO cursor using a bold border rectangle, and it speaks the accessible text) - if you need to press a button or toggle a checkbox or radio button, use control+option+space - if you want to go into a table or tree you need to use control+option+shift+down arrow and then control+option+arrow keys. To get back out of the tree, use control+option+shift+up arrow. - turn VoiceOver off using command+F5 again
