The fact that when I tab through a form on my Mac, it skips the drop downs, which forces me to use the mouse, has been bugging me for a long time. I finally decided to try searching google for an answer and came upon this old, but still very relevant post by Tony Spencer:
http://www.tonyspencer.com/2006/05/02/tab-skips-select-form-fields-in-mac-browsers/
Awesome. The only difference between 2006 and now (Snow Leopard) is that in System Preferences, Keyboard and Mouse have been split into two separate menus, so you should go System Preferences >> Keyboard >> Keyboard Shortcuts to find the ‘All controls’ radio button.
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August 12, 2010 at 10:33 pm
Hrm, what about the issue of tabbing between the “ok” and “cancel” buttons, for example, in program prompts like “Do you wish to save”? The blog article seems to indicate that this gets fixed for Javascript prompts, but I can’t get it to work, in say, Photoshop. Is there some really obvious keyboard shortcut that I’m missing?
August 13, 2010 at 2:59 am
Actually, nevermind, it works with all my other programs. Just not Photoshop for some reason… bad test case. Yay, awesome tip, thanks!
August 13, 2010 at 8:04 am
Oh, too bad it doesn’t work in photoshop. I hadn’t tried that yet, but I was looking forward to it, too!
October 27, 2010 at 10:53 pm
Thanks for this. It boggles my mind why tabbing through all controls is not the default. You’d think with such a focus on usability they would make the keyboard as usable as possible by default.