Determine current state of Full Keyboard Access

This took a little investigation since I didn't know what "Full Keyboard Access" meant. Googling said control-F1 togged the mode. I could not find any keyboard or universal access that corresponded to control-F1. But I did see that com.apple.universalaccess.plist changed when I toggled control-F1.

Comparing com.apple.universalaccess.plist's with control-F1 toggled both ways showed that there is an array key called UserAssignableHotKeys in the plist. It contains five items for five keys. Each of these five items has a bool enabled key.

After yet more checking I found what those 5 keys correspond to the Keyboard Shortcuts, Keyboard&Text Input. I won't list them here. You can see for yourself by bringing up that preference window and pressing control-F1.

So that means you should be able to inquire the settings via a shell script using defaults read.

Need to do some experimentation to determine the exact syntax.

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Update:

Check that. It was what I decribed above. Now the array is not there. Those keybard keys do change as descibe. Stay tuned...

Well that's confusing. In my first post I mentioned five keyboard controls which were toggled using control-F1. Here's my keyboard shortcuts:

Control-F1 toggles those 5 unchecked checkboxes. And what I initially said, where I also said the UserAssignableHotKeys wasn't being set seems to now be set. Here's how I tested for it:

/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy /Volumes/main/ira/Library/Preferences/com.apple.universalaccess.plist -c 'Print :UserAssignableHotKeys:0:enabled'

This will print true of false corresponding to the the first element of those 5 keys in the UserAssignableHotKeys array in the plist. Changing the 0 to 1 througj 4 can check for the others. Seems to work reliably in my testing. Not sure why UserAssignableHotKeys disappeared at one point.

Next post about control-F7. Need to break these up due the time I'm taking constructing these posts and worrying about running up against the 15-minute posting limit imposed in these forums.

Update:

I just discovered that the UserAssignableHotKeys disappears when you use control-F1 while the keyboard shortcuts system preferences is launched. So long as the system preferences are not running the above is a valid test.

As you can see in my above keyboard shortcuts control-F7 moves tab focus. So there is no sense pursuing what plist field that changes.

FWIW, I am using 10.6.5 but I wouldn't think it's that much different from 10.6.8 for this particular stuff. So without knowing exactly what Full Keyboard Access is in Snow Leopard I don't want to pursue this further. So I'll describe the general scheme I used for what I figured out above.

In general, what I did was hit the key-combo in question to see what plist(s) get changed by monitoring the file system changes using fseventer. Open those plist(s) with the Property List Editor (part of xcode), and save the plist as a xml text so that I can compare which fields change when I toggle the key by (text) comparing a before and after versions of the xml plists.

Once the field is known I used PlistBuddy to display the appropriate data. PlistBuddy was used since defaults read is not amenable to extracting a single value out of a plist array.

If you figure out the appropriate PlistBuddy command then it's easy to add that to a shell script to do whatever you want with the value it returns.

Good luck.

Glad you got it.

And after all this I still don't really know what "Full Keyboard Access" means nor where you would toggle it from outside of scripting it, i.e., the "normal way".

Here's a non-applescript command-line solution:

$ defaults read ~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences "AppleKeyboardUIMode"