Use the keyboard to select web page drop-down menus

Apr 27, '07 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: Beorn

One feature I like from Internet Explorer for Windows is that web forms are fully-accessable via the keyboard. For a long time, Safari and other Mac web browsers didn't let you select drop-down menus while navigating through a form by pressing the Tab key, so we had to resort to using the mouse for those, which I found fairly annoying. I'm not sure when this changed, but I've been keyboard-navigating through web forms in Safari for months now!

If you Tab through a web form (such as the one on the hint submission page) with Safari or another WebKit-enabled browser, and then hit the down-arrow key when the drop-down menu highlights, you can select all the options, and even jump to a selection by typing out the first few letters of what you want!

kirkmc adds: I couldn't find anything in the archives about this, though I have a feeling it has probably been hinted before. Note that you can also use the spacebar to select drop-down menus; press the spacebar to display the menu, use the up- or down-arrow keys to move around, then press Enter to confirm your selection.

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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20070424220326575