On a Mac, can you navigate menus with one handed key strokes like Windows?

Question

On a Mac, is there anyway to navigate menus with one handed keyboard strokes like you can in Windows? My girlfriend is a graphic designer and switched from Windows to Mac. She misses being able to use the Alt key and make menu selections. On Windows she can press "Alt" and then move through menus and submenus with one hand on the keyboard. When you press "Alt" the first letter of every menu is highlighted. When she presses a certain letter the menu drops down, and the first letter of every submenu is then highlighted. She can then navigate through all the submenus until she hits the selection she wants, all using the left hand on the keyboard. It's very fast and efficient. Can you do something similar to this on a Mac?
The reason she wants to do this is because when she is in Photoshop, she likes to use her right hand on the mouse with the cursor inside the canvas (sketching, moving layers around) while she makes menu commands with the left hand. It is 10 times faster this way than using the mouse for everything. Hot keys are not the same because you must have those memorized. With the "Alt" key function, you can open a drop down menu, see the choices, and make your selection.
I have been a Mac person my whole life, and I have to say, it's a pretty awesome function. I really want the Mac to have something similar.

Answer 1

Barney-15E wrote:
[Actual studies|http://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html] have found it is faster to use the mouse to make command activations than using keyboard shortcuts.
The 20-year-old argument on that web page isn't very convincing. Keyboard shortcuts are certainly faster for experience power users who do the same thing every day. The mouse is faster only for new users or users doing non-repetitive commands every day.
It is interesting that one of the posts on that page said this:
I remember one mainframe company in the sixties that came up with the following command-key guidelines:
Use the first letter of the command word
If the first letter is already used, use the last letter
If the last letter is already used, use the second letter
If the second letter is already used, use the second-to-the-last letter
etc.
This is actually very similar to how the keyboard-driven menus work in Mac OS X. The advantage over the Windows method is that when there is more than one command in a menu that shares the same first letter, you do not have to memorize which command uses which letter. You just type ahead until the correct command is selected.
I would, however, encourage Derek Doublin1's girlfriend to learn the direct keyboard shortcuts in Photoshop. On Mac or PC, for me pressing Command-Option-I is much faster than either the mouse or using the keyboard to drop the Image menu and walk down to the Image Size command.