Ugh! How to navigate when you have a dead Mouse / Trackpad or accidentally turned off bluetooth

Wow...


Did a stupid thing and turned off bluetooth on my Mac and watched as my Apple Magic Mouse and Apple Magic Trackpad dissapeared and left me stranded.


For those of you dead in the water unable to navigate your Mac here are some tips:


  1. Reboot your Mac and Zap your PRAM which will force the Mac to turn on bluetooth again. Shut down the computer by holding the power button. Hold down Command (the Apple icon 4 leaf clover key), Option, P and R keys together and hold them all down after you turn on the Mac. If you do this before the grey screen you'll see the Mac chime and restart. You can now let go of your keys and see if BlueTooth can now discover your devices.
  2. If you haven't already swapped out batteries in your Mouse, Keyboard or Trackpad please do so. Be sure to not mix batteries of different types in the device.
  3. If you have keyboard access, but not your mouse or trackpad you can press the Option Key 5 times and then your numeric pad should move the mouse allowing you to navigate to things like System Preferences, Bluetooth to turn it back on!
  4. If you have a USB mouse you can plug it in, navigate your mac and turn bluetooth back on.
  5. If you have Apple Screen Share or Apple Remote Access you can use another Mac to log into your Mac and turn on bluetooth.


Serious Accessbility Feature Requests for Apple (and yes I know this isn't the forum or place to put this, but it needs to be said):

  • You need to go back and fix 10.8.4 to allow complete navigation of a Mac with a keyboard only. You can use Command + SpaceBar and type System Preferences and then type BlueTooth, but once you are in the Bluetooth settings you can't use your keyboard to navigate to the ON option.
  • You can't also navigate into System Preferences / Accessibility to turn Enable Mouse Keys (you need a mouse to turn this option on!). The Mouse & Trackpad options should be made so that a keyboard could turn on/off this feature, because a lot of people trying to turn on this feature are folks like me who lost mouse/trackpad access!!


Hopefully this helps others! Hopefully Apple will do some basic UI improvements to bring back OS navigation for users who only have access to a keyboard or just a mouse/trackpad (no physical keyboard). These kinds of tests should be part of every major OS release!

Trackpad-OTHER

Posted on Jul 7, 2013 10:39 PM

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Ugh! How to navigate when you have a dead Mouse / Trackpad or accidentally turned off bluetooth

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