Navigating different movieclips on the same stage with arrow keys while mouse is over movieclip

NOTE: Ned's suggestion is a correct one. I just wanted to point out that depending on your case you may want to utilize commonalities of events.

Because KeboardEvent and MouseEvent extend Event - you can reuse the same listener for both types of interaction:

myButton.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, myEventHandler);

addEventListener(KeyboardEvent.KEY_DOWN, myEventHandler);

myClip.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_OVER, myEventHandler);

function myEventHandler(e:Event):void{

     trace("event type = " + e.type);

     trace("target = " + e.target);

     trace("currentTarget = " + e.currentTarget);

     trace(e is MouseEvent);

     trace(e is KeyboardEvent);

}

ok I'm not sure this would work but I guess you can do that... you need to get the code for the up and down keys and then add keyboard events listeners to them...

Yes, you can add listeners for mouse over and mouse out that add and remove keyboard event listeners, respectively.  The keyboard event handler function could be written such hat it uses a variable to target whichever movieclip is being hovered, that variable being set by the mouse over event handler.