Mac-cessibility Quick Tips is a weekly feature of Lioncourt.com to provide brief tips and tricks to assist blind and visually impaired Mac users improve their Apple experience. Not all tips will be specific to VoiceOver, and most will work on either Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger or Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Now for this week’s tip!

From time to time, VoiceOver users may encounter the dreaded "Unknown". However, just as in the real world, you need not always fear the Unknown. Instead, try interacting with it with VO-Shift-Down Arrow. Many times you will find that the Unknown control is just a container holding a host of other controls and information that VoiceOver can read just fine. An example of this type of Unknown is in the error window that Mac OS X displays when you try to connect to a network drive that isn’t there. The information in this window is contained in an "Unknown", but interacting with it gives you access to all the information.

Until next time!