Need to Access VoiceOver Menu + Other KB Shortcut

Question

I'll try to be brief:
I need to restore my keyboard shortcuts to Default; Shift + T no longer types a capital "T", just nothing. In the VoiceOver menu I set Shift + t to read text. Now I cannot bring back the VoiceOver "floating" menu. Apple's documentation says to press VO-F7, this does nothing at all. I do not remember how I invoked the VoiceOver menu before.
Restoring Defaults in the Keyboard Shortcuts control panel does nothing.
the VoiceOver Utility does not have a section to assign keyboard shortcuts for reading selected text.
thanks!
Intel iMac / OS 10.5.5

Answer 1

Hello Sid,
The function is called "Speak selected text" and it is controlled from the Speech pane of System Preferences. It is not a VoiceOver function, but has in fact been available since System 6 IIRC.
To change the trigger key, go to System Preferences, Speech pane, Text to Speech tab and click the Set Key button to the right of the function name. You can choose anything that is not already allocated to another system function. I have used Command-F8 for this, and it works fine. If you try to set a function key without a modifier, such as F7 alone, you will be asked if you're sure!
For the next problem, I suspect you've (inadvertently) set the Ctrll-Option-F7 combination to trigger some other function. Have a careful look through Keyboard Shortcuts in Keyboard & Mouse, and in any other places where you can set hot keys.
As for launching the VoiceOver Menu from the VoiceOver Utility, it's not provided as a function from there because it's no more useful there than anywhere else. It needs to be available anywhere VoiceOver is active, which is why it's triggered only using a VoiceOver command.
Good luck!
Archie