Hello Matthew, You wrote: > I went to the horizontel spliter and vo shift space on it twice. > Is this what you are refering to?
I'll just try to summarize the content of some of the previous posts. In Snow Leopard, in order to disable the Preview pane in mail, after making sure that your mouse cursor is positioned on the horizontal splitter below the messages area in mail's Message Viewer window, you need to double click on the splitter using either a physical mouse or trackpad or, as Anne stated, if you have a numeric keypad with NumPad Commander activated, you can use the "5" key to click, while on laptops without a numeric keypad, you can turn Mouse Keys on and click by pressing the "i" key. This is different from Leopard, where VoiceOver's software simulation of the mouse click (VO-Shift-Space) could be used to perform the double click (by holding down the Control, Option, and Shift keys and tapping the space bar twice). Lynne's instructions are succinct, but I'd add that it is not necessary to interact with the horizontal splitter and move it down to get rid of the Preview pane -- you simply need to double click on it with your TrackPad to drop the splitter. So I'd simplify this to: 1. In mail, in the Message Viewer window (brought up with Command-0), navigate to the messages table, then VO-Down arrow (or just Down arrow if you have Quick Nav on) to the horizontal splitter. 2. Route your mouse cursor to your VoiceOver cursor with VO-Command-F5 3. Double click with your TrackPad to drop the splitter and remove the Preview pane. There are instances similar to the case with the horizontal splitter where I may need to hardware click, and there are also instances where I may want to be able to move my cursor and click in locations that VoiceOver cannot navigate to, so I have my laptop computer set up to easily switch into and out of Mouse Keys, which allows you to do both. You can make this one time set up under the Universal Access menu of System Preferences: 1. Go to System Preferences > Universal Access (e.g., VO-M or Control-F2 to the Apple Menu, arrow down and type "s y" to move to "System Preferences…" and press return; then navigate to the Universal Access button and press it (VO-Space, or alternatively by simultaneously pressing up and down arrow keys if you are in Quick Nav mode) 2. Under Universal Access navigate to the Mouse & Keyboard tab and select it (VO-Space). On the Mouse & Keyboard pane check the box for "Press the Option key five times to turn Mouse Keys on or off". You can optionally also check the box for "Show Universal Access status in the menu bar" if you want a separate way of monitoring which universal access features are enabled from the status menu bar. 3. Either close the window with Command+W or quite System Preferences with Command+Q, according to your preferences. Now, when I want to turn Mouse Keys on, I quickly tap the Option key 5 times in succession. VoiceOver says "Mouse Keys On" (under the default verbosity settings). Then I double tap the "i" key to perform a double click. I turn Mouse Keys off again with another quick 5 taps of the Option key. When Mouse Keys are turned on, I can move the cursor position on the screen by pressing the keys surrounding the "i" key to move by one pixel up, down, left, right, or diagonally. In the laptops with embedded numpads that could be activated with a num lock key (on the F6 key on the old PowerPC Macs), the "i" key was the "5" key in the center of the numeric keypad, with the "7 8 9" keys in the number key row above it representing "7 8 9" on the numpad, while "u i o" keys were "4 5 6", and "j k l" keys in the row below represented "1 2 3". The idea was that the "5" key -- or the "i" key in the embedded numpad -- represents the current position of the cursor. Each tap of a key to the left, right, above, or below, the current cursor position would move the cursor 1 pixel in that direction when Mouse Keys are activated, and tapping the "5" key or "i" key in the embedded numpad would click the mouse in the current location. This allows users who have difficulty with fine motion control of a mouse, position their mouse accurately and click on locations. For VoiceOver users, this can be useful, because some controls that can't be navigated to with VoiceOver -- like Adobe flash player controls, or some third party status menu bar icons -- can still be announced when move the cursor over them, and clicked with Mouse Keys. This is beyond the scope of the original question, but explains why I close the Preview pane by substituting the double click with the TrackPad in step 3 with the 5 option key presses to enable Mouse Keys and then a double tap of the "i" key to double click, followed by turning Mouse Keys off with another 5 option key presses. I also find it slightly easier to relegate clicking to key presses under Mouse Keys to keep this separate from other TrackPad Commander gestures and actions on the laptop, but that's a very minor point -- I could also use the TrackPad to click. One comment is that you should not have NumPad Commander enabled while you have Mouse Keys turned on, because they lead to conflicting definitions for your keypress on a number pad. However, someone who has a full keyboard with number pad will probably just click on the splitter using the "5" key with NumPad Commander enabled, and will not need to use Mouse Keys for this at all. A final comment: in Lion, you can remove the Preview pane in a similar manner by clicking on the horizontal splitter if you use the "Classic" view for Mail, but if you are not using the "Classic" view, you can do the same by navigating with VO-Right arrow (or RIght arrow in Quick Nav mode) from the messages column to a vertical splitter and double clicking. (And while I have double clicked with the TrackPad here, I find it easier to do with Mouse Keys.) HTH. Cheers, Esther <--- Mac Access At Mac Access Dot Net ---> To reply to this post, please address your message to [email protected] You can find an archive of all messages posted to the Mac-Access forum at either the list's own dedicated web archive: <http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/pipermail/mac-access/index.html> or at the public Mail Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/>. Subscribe to the list's RSS feed from: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.xml> The Mac-Access mailing list is guaranteed malware, spyware, Trojan, virus and worm-free! Please remember to update your membership options periodically by visiting the list website at: <http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/mac-access/options/>
