Restoring ability to add accent marks by holding down keys

I suggest going to System Preferences > Keyboard and on the leftmost (keyboard) tab, check the bottom box "Show Keyboard & Character Viewers in Menu Bar".

Then you can click your keyboard symbol toward the right side of the menu bar, choose "Show Character Viewer", and find and insert your accented letters from there. Double click an accented letter to insert it.

epodlucky wrote:

I used to be able to add accent marks by holding down keys. A couple of days ago I lost that function for no apparent reason. I can't find a way to restore it.

Try creating a new user account and see if you have the same problem when logged into that.

In the meantime, you can make accents using the standard option key shortcuts as before, e.g. option e, then e gives you é.

Did you ever get an answer to this? It happened to me and I can't figure out why. It's driving me crazy.

TTry adding a French or Spanish keyboard to the list in system prefs/keyboard/ input sources and restarting