Black field with rounded white frame suddenly on my desktop describing everything I am doing. When a page loads it cycles a frame over each button/tab/field and doesn't allow me to scroll down the page (it jumps back to what it's highlighting at the top)

So now it says "Edit Text" and then shows every letter and word I type and each time I press the space bar. What is this thing and how do I get it to go away?! Thanks!

iMac (24-inch Early 2008), OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.5), 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo

Posted on Sep 29, 2013 3:38 PM

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2 replies

Sep 29, 2013 4:38 PM in response to Jordan T

After about an hour without any response to my question, I've discovered that it was the VoiceOver feature that had inadvertently been activated. The sound was off and I didn't realize it was speaking all the functions and text as well!


To anyone else who might stumble upon this with the same problem, I went to "System Preferences" then "Accessibility" (under "System") then "VoiceOver" and clicked off the checkmark next to "Enable VoiceOver". The feature is turned on by Toggling Command F5, which must have inadvertently happened when moving or cleaning the keyboard.

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Black field with rounded white frame suddenly on my desktop describing everything I am doing. When a page loads it cycles a frame over each button/tab/field and doesn't allow me to scroll down the page (it jumps back to what it's highlighting at the top)

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