enabling Assistive Devices in 10.9

In Mavericks, Accessibility for Assistive Devices is no longer a global setting, but has to be turned on explicitly on an app-by-app basis. That setting has now moved to the Security & Privacy pane in System Preferences.

If you’re running System Events in AppleScript, Automator or using apps like BetterTouchTool that require Assistive Devices, you’re likely to come up against an error message. For example, a simple script like this:

  tell application “System Events”
     tell application process “Safari”
        UI elements
     end tell
  end tell

will return an error message like this:

The first time this happens, you should get prompted with another dialogue box that looks like this:

Click the button ‘Open System Preferences’. If you accidentally hit ‘Deny’, just go to System Preferences in the normal way and choose the ‘Security & Privacy’ panel.

Click the padlock at the bottom left, enter your admin password, and check the boxes in the panel for the app that’s requesting access.

🙂

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