Getting rid of scroll areas

By Crysania, 5 January, 2015

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

Hello,

I am running Yosemite on the Macbook Air. I find that in a variety of apps, there are scroll areas that are not referred to when I watch podcasts about the app. For example, when I am manually tagging a song in ITunes, I must first interact with a scroll area before I can get to the information. It is the same scenario with search results or tables in finder, and bookmarks in Safari. I have tried turning Quick Nav both on and off, and the scroll areas still exist. I apologize if I am asking something elementary, but is there a way to rid myself of these pesky scroll areas? They introduce an extra step or two that I would rather not have to take.

Thanks so much.

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Comments

By Joseph on Tuesday, January 27, 2015 - 23:32

I don't think you can totally get rid of scroll areas unfortunately. It's part of what VO sees in those apps and I'm sure sighted folks have to deal with them too. While it can get old interacting with them as much as you have to, I can kinda see why they're used.

By Justin on Tuesday, January 27, 2015 - 23:32

Hello,
I don't believe you can remove school areas as it is part of the os, and what VO sees. They've been around for a long time, and won't be going away any time soon. It's just something with the mac that you have to deal with.

By Crysania on Tuesday, January 27, 2015 - 23:32

That's fine, as long as I haven't done something to mess up my computer.

By Ro on Tuesday, January 27, 2015 - 23:32

Hi,

I know exactly what you mean about the extra scroll area step in Yosemite. I didn't notice it before Yosemite. You can change this by changing the view. For example, open a finder window. Interact with the toolbar, interact with the view radio group, and change to icon view. T The table becomes an image browser with no scroll area in there.

The only problem is it messes up the files within. I have a folder of book chapters labeled 01,02 etc and they don't stay in list order. It's choosing the lesser of two evils haha. I for one, hate that extra scroll area enough to live in icon view .

Hope that helps! I often wonder if there's another way I'm missing. Maybe someone will come along who knows more.

By dvdmth on Tuesday, January 27, 2015 - 23:32

Technically, a scroll area, or scroll view, is a portion of a window which may contain more information than there is room to display on screen. A sighted user typically uses gestures on the trackpad, or the scroll wheel on the mouse, to move the contents of the scroll view until they see what they are looking for.

The term scroll area is generic, and VoiceOver uses it only if there isn't another, more descriptive term, for describing the OS element. For example, in Safari the scroll area is described as HTML Content, since the information contained in the scroll area is an HTML webpage.

By Jessica Brown on Tuesday, January 27, 2015 - 23:32

I don't remember where, but somewhere in the settings, I saw an option to set the tab key to interact with scroll areas when tabbing around the screen and once you tab past them interaction stopps.