Black bar suddenly always on my screen telling me everything I'm doing. Also when I load a page it cycles through each button/field and prevents from scrolling down the page (it jumps back to the top where it's still cycling through)

Thank you for your reply, which I didn't see until I had un-marked this as a question. I only discovered in the middle of writing the above post that the sound had been off and there was an audible feature to the bar. With the sound off, it had never occurred to me to check "VoiceOver" the first time I had looked at the "Accessibility" pane. Thanks again for your reply.

To be clear, I figured it out myself after a moment's reflection having realized there was an audible component to what was happening. I had posted this question on the iMac board about an hour before I posted here and as I said, upon posting here and turning up the sound it dawned on me what was going on. In the iMac thread I posted my solution in case anybody with the same problem were to find the thread, and then selected my own solution as an answer to close the question out. But I didn't want to do the same thing here and make it seem like I was answering my own questions all over the boards to get points! So I found that I could still un-mark as a question and did so; only upon doing so did I find your post. Otherwise I would have gone ahead and given you the points anyway, as that was the correct solution. Thanks again.