I have been out of the Linux world for a while due to personal priorities, and just have gotten back into it, but essentially am starting new coming from Windows 10 over to the Linux side. I need to begin by stating that I am visually-impaired and soly rely on the Orca screen reader to navigate my system.
Back in the days, there was a way to access an application's menu bar such as "File, Edit, View, help" by simply pressing the F10 key by itself, which then would move one's focus to the first item in the menu bar.
I'm now running Ubuntu-Mate Desktop 22.04 based on Jammy Jellyfish on an old 2012 Mac Mini which I've wiped completely clean, and installed Linux instead. I'm finding that F10 is not working. Instead, the only consistent workflow I've found to access the menu bar in all applications which have one is to use Orca flat screen review, and hit Orca+numpad 7 to move to top home position, and if that doesn't land me on the menu bar, usually one line below with numpad 9 will get me there where I can hit numpad slash to click and move focus to one of the menus, at which point, I then can easily enough arrow around as expected.
I understand I could hit Alt+F for the file menu, but not all apps have a "File" menu. So, if I'm unaware of what menus are actually in the menu bar to start with, it would take some guess work to figure out a key excellerator to get me up there. So, not very efficient.
It's really weird, as in Terminal if I hit F10, specifically Gnome-Terminal, or Mate-Terminal, I get a bwonk sound, and it seems to type a tilde (~) character. I know I've set my fnmode to "2" so I shouldn't have to hold down the FN key along with any of my 12 F keys, F1-F12.
I did this through
/sys/module/hid_apple/parameters/fnmode
My F10 key works fine if I hold down the FN key and hit F10 within something like Rhythmbox which with my keyboard stops media.
It's almost like the keycode for F10 isn't getting correctly sent to the OS, but I'd have no idea the correct code sequence, nor how to check what's being sent.
Some apps I've tried with include Pluma, Rhythmbox, Sound-Juicer, Gnome-Terminal, Mate-Terminal, VLC, Libri Office Writer, and such.
You can imagine as a blind individual how frustrating this is especially given I can't just use the mouse and physically click in that area.
What on earth has changed, as I know this used to work. Granted, I was on a regular PC at that time. Although come to think of it, I've recently tried on multiple systems with multiple keyboards, and they all have this issue Mac hardware or not.
I've gone into Preferences>Hardware>Keyboard Shortcuts, but there is no entry I can map to F10 to access the menu bar.
I even looked both in Mate-Tweaks and Gnome-Tweaks, which I installed through apt-get to no avale. I mean, it installed, I'm saying, there was no rellavent setting.
I'm totally at a loss! Any help appreciated, and sorry for the long post.
Chris.
