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!

One often overlooked feature of VoiceOver in both Tiger and Leopard is its ability to select non-contiguous items from lists, tables, and the like. This is useful if you have a group of files you wish to copy from one folder to another, for example. If the files you are choosing are all in a row in the Finder’s listing, you can use shift and the arrow keys to highlight all the files in a row. If they are scattered throughout, say one at the start, one in the middle, and one at the end of the listing, you have to use non-contiguous selecting to choose them.

Here are the steps to get this done:

1. Use VoiceOver to interact with the Table, Icon View, or Column Browser where the items you wish to select are displayed.
2. Navigate using VoiceOver navigation commands to the first item you want to select.
3. Turn off Cursor Tracking with VO-Shift-F3.
4. Move to and select each of the other items you wish by pressing the VoiceOver Multiple Select command, VO-Command-Space.
5. When you’re done selecting items, perform the keystroke for the command you wish to perform on them, such as Command-C to copy, Command-Delete to move to the Trash, etc.
6. Turn Cursor Tracking back on again with VO-Shift-F3.

Of course, these steps may vary if you keep your Cursor Tracking off, but chances are if you do that, you already know this tip.

Until next time!