dragging desktop icons using VoiceOver

By Rocco, 22 January, 2014

Forum

macOS and Mac Apps

Hello, This is a rather odd question, and one that I have yet to solve, so I thought I'd reach out to the AppleVis community, to see if anyone could figure this out. I have an external hard drive that appears on my mac's desktop every time it is plugged in. For a while, it was the first icon on the desktop, which is the way I wanted it to stay. About 2 days ago, I added a few files to the desktop, and immediately, all of my icons, including the external hard drive icon, got completely rearranged into a random order. For the heck of it, I reinstalled Mavericks, to see if that would help and it did not. I also looked at the view options in the view menu of Finder, to no avail. Is there a way to sort of "drag and drop" desktop icons to where you want them? (similar to moving app icons in iOS?) I also tried to drag and drop with VoiceOver, but it would not drop the icon anywhere, it just said "drag failed." any assistance on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks so much!! Rocco

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Comments

Sure

The process is a bit tedious. 1: Select the icon you want to drag 2. Press VO keys plus command plus F5 to move the mouse cursor to the icon 3. press VO keysplus command plus shift plus space bar to simulate the holding of the mouse click 4. Press VO keys plus shift plus F3 to disable the VoiceOver cursor control, so you can move the item freely 5. Move to the place in which you want to place your icon 6. Again press VO keys plus command plus shift plus space bar to release the mouse click 7. Press VO keys plus Shift plus F3 to enable the VO cursor control, sometimes it enables by itself. Note: Depending on your configuration, you may need to press the FN key when using the F keys.

hmmm...

Thank you so much for the quick reply, and the detailed steps. However, when I do all of this, the volume icon (the icon for the external hard drive)doesn't move. Maybe this is a mac restriction in finder view options that is set somewhere that I'm not aware of? :) thank you in advance for any further help, and all of your help so far.

The only thing I can think of

The only thing I can think of is hiding the external hdd from the finder preferences.

one more thing

After I tried moving the volume around with no success, I tried moving an alias and a folder around on the desktop, and neither item moved successfully to another location. Maybe I'm missing something in the process?...has anyone tried the method listed here and had luck with it? :) Usually I'm good at figuring tech stuff out, but this one has stumped me...thank you all for any assistance.

I tried dragging items from

I tried dragging items from the desktop and I couldn't either. But there must be a way. I was also looking for a way of organizing the launchpad..

strange

That's very weird that it's not as simple as doing what is described here. Anyone else here have this problem, or found a solution to it? I don't even know how this little hdd icon got moved around, but now it's stuck there for good it seems...

a work around

I would not worry. All I do is just tab through a list in the finder. that by default shows you things in ABC order then just hit cmd down arrow to open it or cmd c to copy it or what ever you want to do to the item. Take care and hth.

Thank you...I was just trying

Thank you...I was just trying to put the external hdd first, as it's name is "My Passport" so alphabetically it would take a while to get to mm, judging by the amount of items I have on my desktop. There has to be a way to drag items around, just trying to figure it out...maybe using the trackpad somehow?

Lol!. there probably is a

Lol!. there probably is a way to do this via the terminal but I have not dug deep enough to find such a thing. I would just tab through and such as that won't make it look any different it will just place the list in abc order when tabbed through. Good luck.