Mac-cessibility Quick Tips is a 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!

Many visually impaired users use the Finder’s built-in ability to jump to and select files by typing the first few letters of the desired file’s name. This proves to be a quick way to navigate through large file lists, as long as you know what you’re looking for. In Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, this can be a problem, however, if the file in question includes a space in its name, especially if that space appears early in the file name. An example might be a file named "A letter to Jane.rtf". As soon as you press the spacebar, QuickLook launches, and chances are you are not on the file you wanted. To avoid this, press Option-Space in place of the spacebar alone. This adds the space character to what you’re looking for, without activating QuickLook.

Until next time!