Hi, all,
I hope you can come up with some ideas… I have a 2017 MacBook with a clean install of Ventura. Setting it up and using it was initially going smoothly, until I went to change some keyboard settings and accidentally enabled “keyboard navigation” — no big deal, just clicked on the wrong thing. I swiftly disabled it, but it is STUCK! I tried installing 13.0.1, I tried rebooting, I tried reseting NVRAM, I tried safe mode — nothing helps.
Specifically, I can go to the keyboard page in settings and turn it off, but although the toggle moves to the “off” position, it doesn’t actually disable the feature, and when the computer restarts or when I log out and then back in, the toggle is also back in the “on” position.
Any ideas for what else I can try, short of wiping the whole computer (which I just spend two days painstakingly setting up…) and being extra careful about NOT clicking on the wrong thing in the settings?
What a bummer! It definitely sounds like something in the Accessibility Settings database has been damaged. It used to be plists that controlled this, and deleting them was the solution. But now it’s a SQLite database, and I’ve got no idea if these can be handled the same way. I know you installed the update, but you could try reinstalling the operating system again. (Not wiping the whole disk, just reinstall on top of itself.) I don’t know if Accessibility settings will persist. They might be considered a different type of setting that should persist.
I did find a terminal command to reset accessibility preferences, but that seemed to be about security preferences, not accessibility settings. It’s quite confusing because people seem to drop the word “security” from those mentions.
If you want to fight it out with Apple tech support, ti does sound like something they should be aware of. I’d wager that the first-line tech support won’t be of much use, so you’ll have to escalate it. At that point, it might be faster to wipe and start again. I don’t know if Accessibility settings are preserved in Time Machine; if not, then you could wipe and migrate from a TM backup. That would save you some set up time.
I ended up wiping the MacBook and reinstalling the OS. Rolled back to Monterey, at least for now…