Hi Teresa and Howard,
Yes, it's possible that the preview pane of Howard's mail is not visible, but
he can check this by trying to navigate from the message list with VO-Right
arrow. If moving past the "horizontal splitter" doesn't get him to the
"message content, scroll area" then the preview pane is hidden. However, since
Snow Leopard I don't think you can use VO-Shift-Space to double-click on
horizontal splitter to either drop or raise it. You have to physically click
on it with your mouse or trackpad. What I've been able to do on my laptop
after using VO+Command+F5 to make sure that my mouse cursor is routed to my
VoiceOver cursor on the horizontal splitter (or after checking that it's on the
horizontal splitter with VO+F5 if I have my cursors tracking), is to turn Mouse
Keys on and then double tap on the "i" key to do the double-click on the
horizontal splitter. This works just like a physical or "hardware click" with
mouse or trackpad. I set up Mouse Keys so that it can be turned on and off by
pressing the "Option" key 5 times quickly. It makes a chittering noise when
Mouse Keys gets turned on or off. Pressing the "i" is where the current mouse
position is, and is like pressing the "5" key on a numeric keypad with Numpad
Commander activated. The "i" key was the location of the "5" key on the
embedded numeric keypad for laptops, which disappeared after November 2007.
However, this is still used to let people move the mouse cursor independently
on laptops that do not have numeric keypads. Pressing keys to the left, right,
above, or below the "i" key move the cursor one screen pixel in that direction.
Diagonal moves by pressing the keys above (or below) and to the left (or
right) of the "i" key are also possible, and double tapping the "i" key is like
performing a double-click with a mouse or trackpad button. The sequence after
verifying you're on the horizontal splitter, or where you want to click or
double click is: press the option key 5 times quickly (assuming you enabled
this as a way to toggle MouseKeys on and off on the Keyboard tab of the
Universal Access Menu under System Preferences); double tap the "i" key to
double-click; press the option key 5 times quickly again to turn off MouseKeys.
I'm still not sure whether Howard actually lost his Preview pane -- but if
there's no "message content, scroll area" when he navigates to the right of the
horizontal splitter, that would be the case. It may be more likely that his
Mail preferences file ("com.apple.mail.plist" in the "Library/Preferences"
folder of his home directory) just got corrupted. If so, he could try closing
Mail, then moving that preference file to his Desktop and moving an older
version of his Mail preferences file to the "Library/Preferences" folder of his
home directory, and see whether that solves the problem when he next opens
Mail. If that doesn't solve things, he can always move the current mail
preferences file back to his "Library/Preferences" folder.
Incidentally, I save a copy of some of my most commonly used preference files
in a separate folder on Disk, since these are quite small, so I don't have to
grab these off a backup. Instead of trying to figure out which these are by
name, I just use Command-Shift-G (the "Go to Folder" shortcut) in Finder from
my Home directory, type in "Library/Preferences" (without the quotation marks)
in the text box and press "Return", then sort the (list view) table according
to date modified and copy the first 50 or so files. While preference (or
"plist") files don't often get corrupted, "often" is a relative term. And
these files get opened, updated, and re-written every time you open or modify
the corresponding application. So after a few years of steady use, it's
possible for one of these to get corrupted and not correctly record your
preferences.
In a few instances, odd behavior in apps will be fixed if you do a reboot.
HTH. Cheers,
Esther
On Jun 18, 2011, at 11:15, Teresa Cochran wrote:
> Hi, Howard and all,
>
> It sounds like the preview pane isn't visible. When you have VO on the
> message list, stop interacting with it and VO right once more to where it
> says "horizontal splitter". Do a VO-f5 to be sure you have the mouse
> positioned on it, then a VO-shift- space to click it.
>
> HTH,
> Teresa
> On Jun 18, 2011, at 12:39 PM, Howard Dupuis wrote:
>
>> All of a sudden, and for no reason I can think of, the command VO-j,
>> which I use a million times each day in Mac Mail to jump from a
>> message in the inbox to that actual message, isn't working. Instead of
>> doing what it's supposed to do, it interacts with the list of
>> mailboxes. Huh? Yes, I've tried rebooting. Any thoughts about what
>> I've done and what I might try to do to get it back the way it's been
>> for nearly three years now?
>> Thanks so much.
>> Howard
>>
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