Navigating system menu bar items with keyboard?

[dukee101]

Is it possible to navigate within system menu bar items (Sound, WiFi, Bluetooth, etc) with the keyboard, say with the tab key?

For example, I've built an Alfred Workflow that lets me open the 'Sound' menu bar item by typing 'snd', and this works. However, I can't hit 'tab' to start navigating various sound output options. Is such a thing even possible?

If this isn't "natively" possible, there must be some system Accessibility feature that allows this, no?

 

[Brian33]

I guess you're talking about the icons on the right side of the menu bar (not the application's menu items). I'm currently on an old machine (High Sierra), but once I click on one menu bar item, I can use Tab (or right-arrow) to go to another menu bar item, and up and down arrows to select from their menus. So I'm not sure I understand the problem...

You are saying once you open the 'Sound' menu bar item, can't you type 'down-arrow' to navigate the menu lines? It works for me in the WiFi item, anyway.

(OH, I seem what you mean now -- the Sound item seems special. I just enabled it, and it seems that up/down arrow doesn't navigate the menu lines, but instead changes the volume level. I can't seem to find any keyboard combo that will navigate Sound's menu. It seems that the Sound item is different from most of the others. Sorry I don't have a solution!)

 

[dukee101]

I guess you're talking about the icons on the right side of the menu bar (not the application's menu items). I'm currently on an old machine (High Sierra), but once I click on one menu bar item, I can use Tab (or right-arrow) to go to another menu bar item, and up and down arrows to select from their menus. So I'm not sure I understand the problem...

You are saying once you open the 'Sound' menu bar item, can't you type 'down-arrow' to navigate the menu lines? It works for me in the WiFi item, anyway.

(OH, I seem what you mean now -- the Sound item seems special. I just enabled it, and it seems that up/down arrow doesn't navigate the menu lines, but instead changes the volume level. I can't seem to find any keyboard combo that will navigate Sound's menu. It seems that the Sound item is different from most of the others. Sorry I don't have a solution!)

Are you on macOS Big Sur? It doesn't sound like you are. There's been radical changes to the menu bar since Big Sur. I can't get up/down arrow keys to work for any system menu bar panel.

 

[HenryAZ]

CTRL-F8 puts you into that space, and you can arrow back and forth and down.

 

[dukee101]

CTRL-F8 puts you into that space, and you can arrow back and forth and down.

That's not accomplishing the goal. Hitting CTRL+F8 selects an arbitrary menu bar item, and then no arrow key nor tabbing works to cycle through other menu bar items. (macOS Big Sur 11.6)

 

[HenryAZ]

That's not accomplishing the goal. Hitting CTRL+F8 selects an arbitrary menu bar item, and then no arrow key nor tabbing works to cycle through other menu bar items. (macOS Big Sur 11.6)

The arrow keys work just fine on Mojave to cycle icons. But it apparently only works for Apple system stuff. It skips over the 1Password icon and the Little Snitch icon, for example. Sounds like Apple must have changed the behavior for Big Sur.

 

[dukee101]

Sounds like Apple must have changed the behavior for Big Sur.

Indeed they've changed a lot about the system menus. Thanks to this comprehensive post, I've come to learn that "most of the system menus aren’t controlled by SystemUIServer ... [but] by the ControlCenter process".

Further, from the perspective of AppleScript, "the system menus aren’t menu elements, and menu items aren’t menu item elements. In Big Sur, system menus are application windows, and menu items are buttons or checkboxes that are nested in groups and scroll areas."

Given this new reality in Big Sur, I'm at an impasse on how to natively keyboard-navigate system menus