Pressing my "tab" key repeatedly highlights EVERY item in Safari / Mail...
Lately a few Apple applications have been playing up on me, and annoying me in the process...
Normally, in Safari, up until a few days ago, when I pressed my "tab" key when on a form page for example, my cursor would hop from one form field to another, as I would expect it to, and ONLY elements like form fields, drop-down menus, etc.
But lately, when I press the "tab" key, it is going through EVERY clickable item in my browser window.
Now I know what you're thinking, but it's NOT the "press tab to highlight each item on a webpage" option in the Prefs. I've checked that already and it's turned off. Besides that, the symptoms I'm experiencing are "worse" or more extreme than that. When I say every clickable item, I really do mean EVERY clickable item, because it's not just items on the webpage itself, but also within the Safari framework as well. For example, if my cursor is in the URL field, and I press "tab" several times, it cycles through my URL field, then my Google search field (so far, normal). but then bizarrely, it highlights the links in my bookmarks bar one by one, even the little bookmarks symbol itself (the one that looks like a little open book), then it will go down into my tabs and highlight the little close "X" on the first tab, then the name in the first tab, then the close "X" in the second tab, etc.
And when I finally do get down onto the HTML page itself, things like text hyperlinks do NOT get highlighted (ruling out the "press tab" option in my prefs), but OS-level buttons (like "enter" or "cancel") and radio buttons and checkboxes DO get highlighted.
This problem is not only confined to Safari, because it's happening to me in Mail as well: I tab through the "To", "Cc", "Subject" fields, etc. and where I would normally expect to be able to tab from the "Subject" field straight into the body copy of the email, I now instead find myself tabbing through the "Account", "Signature" and "Priority" drop-downs before I can get to the body copy section.
Because it's happening to me in several applications, I had my suspicions that this was something to do with "Universal Access" in my OS-level System Preferences, and that maybe I had pressed a shortcut key-combination by mistake and had accidentally activated some setting in there, but I've been through it all, and I can't see anything that might be doing this -- but I might be missing it, so if anyone can think what it might be, please do let me know, because it's very very frustrating indeed...
Thanks!
P.S: Please also note that this is nothing to do with the (relatively) recent update to Safari, which allowed for drop-down menus to be selected when tabbing through forms. I received that update some months ago, and have not updated my system recently, at not least nowhere near the time when the problem which I write about here occurred.
Thank you again...
Normally, in Safari, up until a few days ago, when I pressed my "tab" key when on a form page for example, my cursor would hop from one form field to another, as I would expect it to, and ONLY elements like form fields, drop-down menus, etc.
But lately, when I press the "tab" key, it is going through EVERY clickable item in my browser window.
Now I know what you're thinking, but it's NOT the "press tab to highlight each item on a webpage" option in the Prefs. I've checked that already and it's turned off. Besides that, the symptoms I'm experiencing are "worse" or more extreme than that. When I say every clickable item, I really do mean EVERY clickable item, because it's not just items on the webpage itself, but also within the Safari framework as well. For example, if my cursor is in the URL field, and I press "tab" several times, it cycles through my URL field, then my Google search field (so far, normal). but then bizarrely, it highlights the links in my bookmarks bar one by one, even the little bookmarks symbol itself (the one that looks like a little open book), then it will go down into my tabs and highlight the little close "X" on the first tab, then the name in the first tab, then the close "X" in the second tab, etc.
And when I finally do get down onto the HTML page itself, things like text hyperlinks do NOT get highlighted (ruling out the "press tab" option in my prefs), but OS-level buttons (like "enter" or "cancel") and radio buttons and checkboxes DO get highlighted.
This problem is not only confined to Safari, because it's happening to me in Mail as well: I tab through the "To", "Cc", "Subject" fields, etc. and where I would normally expect to be able to tab from the "Subject" field straight into the body copy of the email, I now instead find myself tabbing through the "Account", "Signature" and "Priority" drop-downs before I can get to the body copy section.
Because it's happening to me in several applications, I had my suspicions that this was something to do with "Universal Access" in my OS-level System Preferences, and that maybe I had pressed a shortcut key-combination by mistake and had accidentally activated some setting in there, but I've been through it all, and I can't see anything that might be doing this -- but I might be missing it, so if anyone can think what it might be, please do let me know, because it's very very frustrating indeed...
Thanks!
P.S: Please also note that this is nothing to do with the (relatively) recent update to Safari, which allowed for drop-down menus to be selected when tabbing through forms. I received that update some months ago, and have not updated my system recently, at not least nowhere near the time when the problem which I write about here occurred.
Thank you again...
1.5 GHz 17' PowerBook G4, Mac OS X (10.4.5), 1 GB RAM
