Assigning hotkeys to styles in Pages for Mac

Introduction

iWork 13 was a big update. One that excited blind people, and at the same time annoyed power users. Because the iWork apps were rewritten from scratch, not every feature was included at first. One of these features is assigning hotkeys to styles, which later was brought back in an update. A couple times I’ve seen people asking how it works, so I sat down to figure it out.

How it’s done?

• Open up pages
• Create a new document
• Jump to the formatter with VO-J
• At this point, you should already have the “styles” option selected, so keep going right to the paragraph styles button and press it.
• Now, a popover opens. Find the table and interact with it to pick a style.
• As you move over the styles, Voiceover reads them as buttons. What it doesn’t tell you is that every style is a group. So find the style you want to add a hotkey to, EG heading, and interact.
• You should now still see the button for the style, and next to it a menu button, and that’s where you want to go.
• It’s really obvious what to do from here. Find the “shortcut” option, and open it. You can assign 8 of them, to the first 8 function keys.

There you go. You can repeat this procedure to change a hotkey or remove it as well.