Black boxes around my icons?

[Gilbert Taylor]

Ive been using a mac for about 3 months and ive just had a friend over, it seems hes managed to do some keyboard shortcut to activate black boxes around the icon ive selected to kinda highlight it. They seem to act weird.. often appearing in funny places.

I also noticed i now have this in my top apple taskbar:

Sleep
Restart...
Restart
Shutdown...
Shutdown
Log out ***....
Log out ***

I dont have any antivirus software but have firewalls ect and im not sure whats going on? help would be greatly appreciated (possibly doing something like a system restore to yesterday if thats possible

 

[ElDiabloConCaca]

You've got something turned on under "Universal Access"... can't quite remember which option it is, but a simple search here should point you to a thread with a solution.

I wanna say it's got something to do with "Speech" or "Speech Recognition" under the "Universal Access" pane of the System Preferences.

 

[ra3ndy]

The feature is called VoiceOver. You can turn it off by pressing Apple+F5.

 

[Gilbert Taylor]

argh i know about voiceover but i had my speakers turned off so didnt notice, thanks that was very much appreciated.