Certain Keys On Your Mac Not Working Properly?.
Are you trying to type on a Mac keyboard and find that some keys just don’t work? Or is pressing these keys not producing the expected result? When you press the I key, is something being clicked instead of the letter I?
If you are having any of these strange issues with your Mac or Magic Keyboard, it could be because one of the accessibility features in OS X was accidentally enabled. The main culprit here is the mouse keys that can be used to control the mouse with the keyboard.
While this comes in handy in certain situations, it can be really annoying and frustrating unless you specifically enable it. In this article, I will introduce the mouse keys and how to disable them.
What are mouse keys used for?
Mouse Keys are a feature built into most modern operating systems that allows those who cannot use a physical mouse to control the mouse pointer using the keyboard.
The mouse keys work pretty much the same on both Windows and OS X. On a Mac, if you have a keyboard without a numeric pad on the right side, this will allow you to control your mouse with the following keys: 7, 8, 9, U, I, O, J, K, L and M.
Again, you’ll only really notice this on Apple keyboards that don’t have a numeric keypad, which are pretty much really old. For them, all of a sudden, you won’t be able to type words correctly because the right side of the keyboard no longer works properly. Instead, it is used to move the mouse pointer and click.
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Disable Mouse Keys on Mac
For the keyboard to work again, you just need to disable the mouse keys. You might think that it would be pretty simple and that you can easily find it in System Preferences, but you were wrong.
If you go to System Preferences and click on Keyboard, you will see five tabs, none of which will help you disable mouse keys!
Then you can go to System Preferences and click Accessibility and then click Keyboard and hopefully find a setting there, but again you will be disappointed.
You can turn Sticky Keys and Slow Keys on and off, but there is no option for mouse keys, although this is a keyboard accessibility feature. So how do you access the mouse key settings?
There are two ways: If you have a Mac with Touch ID, you can quickly click the Touch ID button three times to open the accessibility options panel. If you don’t have Touch ID, you can press the Option + Command + F5 keyboard shortcut.
Finally, here you see the option to enable or disable mouse keys and many other settings. Go ahead and uncheck Enable mouse keys and your keyboard should be back to normal.
If you’d like to know what all the other accessibility options do, visit Apple‘s page for that. Also, don’t forget to check out our other article on how to right-click on Windows and Mac using your keyboard.
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