What’s up with text legibility?
QMost of the time, the contrast on my 2012, 15-inch MacBook Pro is insufficient for reasonable reading. I’ve tried adjusting the display’s contrast along with Accessibility settings to no avail. Is there any other way of making the system characters darker so they contrast better?
by Stewart Davis
AThere are probably three interlinked issues: macOS’s system font, which many find too ‘thin’ to show sufficient contrast against white; font size, which forces most elements in glyphs to be a pixel thick; and the actual blackness of display black.
Ruling the third out is easiest to do. Find a matte surface that appears fully black, and compare it against a black rectangle on the display. If the latter only appears dark grey, your Mac has a display problem. You can confirm that by setting it against a known good display. If you can’t correct that using the Calibrate feature in the Displays pane’s Color tab, there may be a problem in the graphics processor or, more likely in an older Mac, the display itself.
The other two things can be checked by comparing different fonts and sizes in a text-oriented app against the system font. Unfortunately, many people who experience similar problems don’t find the Accessibility pane’s tools to be much help in addressing them, unless they go to the extreme of using its Zoom feature, which brings its own costs.
Important adjuncts to this include the adjustment of ambient lighting to suffuse and attenuate incoming sources of daylight and artificial light, and, whenever possible, using a good external display, which should deliver better resolution and contrast.