Hi Dónal,
Well, in your case the easiest way to type "o acute" would probably be
to switch to an Irish keyboard and press Option+O, which would save
you one extra keystroke. You can select this under the
"International" menu of "System Preferences" by going to the "Input
Menu" tab, interacting with the table, and then checking the box to
turn on the keyboard for either "Irish" or "Irish Extended".
(Probably "Irish" is preferred, since it will give you the characters
you want without having to use Unicode encoding extensions.) The
input language keyboards are listed alphabetically after a few
character-based language options (for Chinese, Korean, etc.). If you
don't currently use the option key to type any special characters, you
can just keep the Irish keyboard as your default keyboard. It will
only affect which option key combinations you will need to press for
other special characters that are probably infrequently used.
With the Irish keyboard selected you would be able to type acute
accents over all vowels just by pressing the option key at the same
time: á é í ó ú And you could type o+e and a+e ligatures by
pressing option+q and option+apostrophe: "œ" and "æ".
The easiest way to figure out different input keyboards is to use
TextEdit and start typing combinations with variations of pressing the
option, command, control and shift keys.
Getting back to input language keyboard selection, you can check as
many languages as you wish to use in the table on the Input Menu tab,
then stop interacting and check the box for "Show input menu in menu
bar" so that your current text input language keyboard appears on the
status menu bar. You'll also notice that just after the table of
keyboard layouts there are Input menu shortcuts for quick switching
between your different keyboards. There is a conflict between the
default input switching shortcuts and the Spotlight shortcut -- Apple
assigned the same shortcut to Spotlight as it had been using for many
years for input switching. I've changed my shortcut for "Select
previous input source:" to be "⌥⇧Space" and "Select next input
source in menu: " to be "⌥Space". You can press (VO-Space) the
button for Keyboard Shortcuts to be taken to the "Keyboard Shortcuts"
tab of the "Keyboard & Mouse" menu (in Leopard) to reassign the
shortcuts. I'm not upgraded yet to Snow Leopard, so I won't try to
give exact directions, but in Leopard you'd interact with the table of
shortcuts, navigate to the end with VO-End (on a laptop this would be
VO-Fn-Shift-Right Arrow), and then VO-Left arrow back to the
Description column and VO-Up arrow to find the entries for "Input
Menu" and "Spotlight". I'd expand each entry (VO-backslash on an
English input keyboard; or VO-H twice to bring up the Commands menu
and select "Toggle Disclosure Triangle" will work if you don't have an
English input keyboard). Then I'd uncheck the boxes for the Spotlight
commands in conflict (temporarily) and check the boxes for the input
menu shortcuts I'd want to assign. There used to be an incredibly
annoying focus bug, where you couldn't reassign the shortcut by
following the instructions to double-click in the column for the the
new shortcut (with VO-Shift-Space) and then type in the new sequence
-- just for these keys because of the conflicting definitions. It
turned out that if you simply tabbed to the column for the new
shortcut and typed in the new shortcut assignment, things would work.
Alternatively, if you wanted to avoid these frustrations, you could
check the boxes for both Spotlight and Input Menu shortcuts (with
exactly the same definitions), and then stop interacting with the
table and go to the "Restore Defaults" button and press it (VO-Space).
Persevering with the shortcut change would leave me with these
definitions:
Input Menu:
Select the previous input source
Option-Shift-Space
Select the next input source in the input menu Option-Space
Spotlight:
Show Spotlight search field Command-Space
Show Spotlight window
Command-Shift-Space
Taking the easy route of pressing the "Restore Defaults" button would
give me:
Input Menu:
Select the previous input source
Command-Space
Select the next input source in the input menu Option-Command-
Space
Spotlight:
Show Spotlight search field Control-Space
Show Spotlight window
Control-Option-Space
I don't like changing standard defaults for things like Spotlight, so
I prefer the first route.
You'll probably need to restart your machine to have the shortcuts
take effect, since they'll across all applications. If you don't
change language keyboards, or do so only rarely, there's no need to
define a shortcut. You can just use VO-M twice or Control-F8 to move
to the status menu bar and navigate to the "Text Input" menu, arrow
down, and set your input language keyboard. However, if you're
composing in another language, it's convenient to just use Option-
Space to switch into the keyboard for the next language in the list.
I confess that I never type frequently enough on an AZERTY (French)
keyboard to get used to having my "A" and "Q" keys and "W" and "Z"
keys switched, so I will switch to a Canadian French keyboard instead,
that gives me the accented characters, but leaves the letters in the
order that I'm used to.
HTH. Incidentally (off this topic), how did your Open VPN solution
work out? Did Viscosity work accessibly for you? There was an
interesting blog post from Rogue Amoeba about the accessibility issues
in the status menu bar icons:
http://www.rogueamoeba.com/utm/2009/08/27/soundsource-2-5-and-a-story-about-the-menubar/
It turns out that those applications like Tunnelblick and Viscosity
which have status bar menu icons that VoiceOver can't access use
Apple's recommended (for third party software) “NSStatusItem”
method of implementing the icon, while apps that do provide icons that
VoiceOver can see implement the menu bar icon using the “menuExtra”
method that Apple uses for its own software. Software developers that
use the "menuExtra" method rely on a "haxie" called "Menu Extra
Enabler" from Unsanity, which has to get fixed up each time there is
an operating system upgrade. My archived post about this is at:
http://www.mail-archive.com/macvisionaries%40googlegroups.com/msg09249.html
(Accessible Status Menu Bar Icons and VoiceOver)
in case you want to read more about this.
Cheers,
Esther
Donal Fitzpatrick wrote:
>
> Hi there,
>
> Just wondering if there is an easier way to type accented characters
> than the method I'm presently using. Let's assume I want to insert
> the letter "o acute" into a document. The way I'm presently doing
> this is to press "option-e" followed by "o". Is there a way to do
> this in one keystroke?
>
> Thanks
>
> Dónal
> >
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