Keying accented characters on the Apple Mac

Grave and acute accents can be keyed in using the Alt key on the Mac (labelled Option on older Macs) in combination with the grave key or ‘e’ key respectively:

à<Alt+`> <a>
è<Alt+`> <e>
ì<Alt+`> <i>
ò<Alt+`> <o>
ù<Alt+`> <u>
á<Alt+e> <a>
é<Alt+e> <e>
í<Alt+e> <i>
ó<Alt+e> <o>
ú<Alt+e> <u>
À<Alt+`> <A>
È<Alt+`> <E>
Ì<Alt+`> <I>
Ò<Alt+`> <O>
Ù<Alt+`> <U>
Á<Alt+e> <A>
É<Alt+e> <E>
Í<Alt+e> <I>
Ó<Alt+e> <O>
Ú<Alt+e> <U>

If anyone can improve on this page I would be very glad of assistance (caoimhin@smo.uhi.ac.uk). We have mostly PCs here and I only rarely use a Mac.

Older information

Irish Accessories:
The best way to key accented characters on the Mac, especially if you only need the acute accents used in Irish Gaelic, is to use Mike Brady's Irish Accessories set of extras, which is downloadable as shareware. As well as providing an easy way of keying accented characters, this provides upgrades to some of the original Macintosh system fonts (Geneva, Monaco and New York) since the original fonts lack accents on some of the capital letters.


Ciarán Ó Duibhín has produced a deadkey Irish keyboard utility for the Mac.

2011-10-24 CPD