Among Apple’s accessibility features in macOS, Mouse Keys are perhaps the most maligned by those who didn’t want to enable it. It’s easy to turn on while you’re idly playing with the keyboard or when a kid or cat inadvertently swats at it. When enabled, Mouse Keys allows some use of the keyboard or numeric keypad on an extended keyboard to enable pointer movement.
With macOS Ventura, Apple moved the setting necessary to prevent mouse keys from ever being accidentally activated. Here’s how to customize it.
- Time to complete: 3 minutes
- Tools Needed: macOS Ventura
Accessibility System Settings
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Go to > System settings > Accessibility > Pointer control.
Pointer Controls > Mouse Keys
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Click the i (info) button to the right of Mouse Keys. (Clicking Mouse Options just above displays a speed control setting for a real mouse.)
Enable mouse keys
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Disable “Press the Option key five times to switch mouse keys” if enabled. Then click OK.
With those settings turned off, not accidentally pressing the Option key will cause your keyboard to behave unexpectedly.
One final piece of advice: when testing the steps above, it worked as documented. Not long after, however, I pressed the Option key five times to no avail. I went back to the setting above and found it was enabled even though I had it disabled. Turning it off again this time it seemed like Mouse Keys didn’t recognize the Option key pressed five times.
This Mac 911 article is an answer to a question from Macworld reader Jennifer.
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