Some of these ideas people are familiar with, but I will toss them
out anyway.
Macintosh commands, full keyboard access, and VoiceOver all work
together. The more you know about basic commands the easier your
computer and the less steps in navigating via a screen reader. The
Mac is very standard or rather consistent with commands.
For people switching from a PC:
1) Many of the commands one might know on the PC are the same on the
Mac. We simply use the Command key (to the left and right of the
Space Bar) rather than the Control key.
2) Our menus are consistently drawn at the top of the screen rather
then within windows.
3) Closing a window on a Mac generally does not quit or exit the
application.
The basic commands:
Command Q - Quit Application
Command N - New
Command O - Open
Command W - Close Window
Command S - Save
Command P - Print
Command Z - Undo
Command X - Cut
Command C - Copy
Command V - Paste
Command A - Select All
Command Comma - Application Preferences
Command Tab - Application Switcher
We all should indeed make more use of Spotlight to locate ANYTHING,
not only does it look for the name of item but also content. So now
we can find terms within an email or text document. As an exercise
try to always use it first before using the Finder to navigate
through your harddrive.
The command for Spotlight - Command Space
To Navigate to locations within your computer (found in the Go menu
in the Finder);
Command Shift C - Computer (your hard drive, mounted: CD's, DVD's,
External or Network Drives, etc).
Command Shift H - Home Directory (Where your personal content is
located).
Command Shift K - Network
Command Shift A - Applications
Command Shift U - Utility's (found within the Applications folder)
In all lists including the menus you can jump by typing the first
letter or quickly the first two letters of the term. This includes
icon view on the Desktop or Finder windows. The Tab key will move you
alphabetically.
Everything in the Finder window Sidebar, along with the Dock are
alias's (or shortcuts). You can put anything, applications,
documents, and folders onto the Dock or into the Sidebar.
I generally will create a folder for my work within the documents
folder (because some applications create folders in the Documents
folder too).
Example of the file path: Macintosh HD / Users / Woody / Documents /
Woody's Documents
I will often force that folder to the top of the list by adding a
space before the term itself.
After the creation of that folder I do two things:
1) Through the Finder preferences I set the "New Finder windows
open:" to that specific folder.
2) I add that folder to the Finder Sidebar by selecting the folder
and using Command T or Add to Sidebar in the File menu.
Put commonly used folders in the Sidebar as the sidebar is drawn in
the open and save dialogue windows thereby assisting navigation.
Learning the commands I have outlined speeds everyone up, it's just
more fun.
Woody
