What can you do when you've accidentally turned your brightness all of the way down in a way that largely forbids keyboard use?

Question

I've recently encountered something quite annoying in Xfce. I can control my brightness with my Fn key shortcuts only if I am not in a menu. This means that if I go in to the power manager plugin panel icon's menu and accidentally turn my brightness all of the way down, blackening my screen, my only methods of restoring it are to click blindly in hopes of either getting off of the power manager's menu or upping my brightness. As this may cause me to click on something undesirable, this is not a good method. However, being in a menu blocks all of my non-Syskey keyboard inputs, including Ctrl+Alt+T and my Fn keys, so it appears that my only other course of action is to REISUB or to change in to a tty that will also be totally black and therefore useless (the ttys also ignore my Fn keys).

My question then is this: What should I do when I've accidentally turned my brightness all of the way down with the power manager's menu?

Answer 1

Have you tried the Escape key to get out of the power manager menu?

Have you tried using the XFCE global shortcuts as discussed here:

http://www.linux-pages.com/2011/04/remove-xfce-global-shortcuts-e-g-ctrl-f4/