Black boxes surround text fields

Some users have experienced an issue in which a black border suddenly surrounds the text they are typing.

Apple Discussions poster john2014dd writes:

"When I type on the screen a black box is highlighted. How do I get rid of this?"

Mac OS X comes with a host of features for easy accesibility. This feature is part of the Universal Access system in Mac OS X that includes features for hearing-impaired and visually-impaired users. These features include enhancing contrast, inverting colors, screen magnification, flashing alerts, text-to-speech, and voice over.

The feature described by this user, with the black box surrounding text entry areas and other points of focus, is from VoiceOver; it can be inadvertently activated by a keystroke, and as such may appear to happen seemingly out of nowhere. While it should be accompanied by the computer's voice dictating events that are happening in the focus box, if users have the volume muted or very low then they may not hear the audio feedback of VoiceOver. VoiceOver also has a special utility for customizing it's behavior and it's possible as well that only a few features have been activated.

Fix: Turn off VoiceOver This can be done either by pressing command-F5 (the Fn key may need to be pressed as well), or by going to the "Universal Access" system preferences and clicking the "Off" radio button under "VoiceOver".

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