Mobility Assistive Devices

Check the box next to 'Enable access for assistive devices' Enable Accessibility on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and 10.6 Snow Leopard. Open System Preferences Universal Access Check the box next to 'Enable access for assistive devices'. I want to enable access for assistive devices programmatically. Have another way to do this that not use NSURL.prefPaneURL = NSURL fileURLWithPath:paths objectAtIndex:0. For privacy reasons, OS X does not allow third-party applications (such as TextExpander) to log keystrokes, unless access for assistive devices is turned on. In OS X 10.8 and earlier: Go to the System Preferences and activate the Universal Access preference pane (the one with the little person in front of a blue background).

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Enable and disable Assistive Devices via Terminal

Excellent. I was looking at this problem, and I'm glad you got it sussed. I do however remove the part that says: [b]password pwd [/b] as I'm sure the script will prompt you for an admin password. I'm looking at this from a security point of view. Regards, Jay Enable access for assistive devices mac mojave

Enable access for assistive devices mac mojave

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-J-

Enable and disable Assistive Devices via Terminal

If you just want to just applescript turning on and off GUI scripting, then you can do something like this:
tell application 'System Events'
set UI elements enabled to true
end tell
The user will get prompted to enter their credentials. No need to use the do shell script.

On my 10.4.6 system, this file actually appears to contain a single character - in my case, the letter 'a'. Enable Access For Assistive Devices Mac

So, to be safe, it appears it would be better to: ..instead.

Argh - submitted too soon..

Almost correct: The file should NOT contain the trailing newline. So, that means it should be: (with the extra '-n' switch passed to echo)

Sorry about that..

I figured out it would even be better to change that into:
sudo echo -n 'a' > /private/var/db/.AccessibilityAPIEnabled
sudo chmod 444 /private/var/db/.AccessibilityAPIEnabled
Not using the -n would leave an 'a' followed by a 'newline' inside the file instead of just the 'a'

Enable and disable Assistive Devices via Terminal

It is useful to point out that System Preferences should not be open during this procedure. I discovered this while debugging a script that used the aforementioned code while I had the Accessibility prefpane open.

Enable and disable Assistive Devices via Terminal

In Snow leopard I find that this does not work. It creates the hidden file, places the 'a' within, and in system preferences the 'enable access for..' is checked, but my applescripts still say 'access for assistive devices is disabled'. Mac os x snow leopard iso vmware download. Only once I manually check the checkbox do the scripts work. This leads me to believe that something else, other than the .AccessibilityAPIEnabled file is happening under Snow Leopard.
My whole goal is to have a window/app management script that launches and places all of my startup apps/windows for dual monitors. I despise the automated mouse movement that comes with 'access for assistive devices' but I need this to move and resize the windows so in a single applescript i want to:
1. turn the access on
2. move and place the windows
3. turn the access off

Mobility Assistive Devices

Enable and disable Assistive Devices via Terminal