Master Accessibility on Mac
Here’s how to use VoiceOver and zoom and hover on your Mac
Accessibility settings on the Mac are controlled from the Accessibility pane in System Preferences. It is split into four sections to make it easier to find each setting — Vision, Hearing, Motor, and General. You can also choose to show Accessibility status in your Mac’s menu bar. If you choose that option, the Accessibility icon (a human figure inside a circle) will appear in the menu bar. If you click it, you will be able to choose any Accessibility setting.
In addition, if you tap the Touch ID button three times, you will see a menu of Accessibility items that you can specify. Press the Tab key to move from one to the next and the Spacebar to select one. Your Mac will read them to you as you select them.
It’s important to note that Accessibility controls can be useful for lots of people, beyond those with physical limitations in their ability to interact with their Mac. For example, anyone who suffers from motion sickness will benefit from the “Reduce motion” option (Accessibility > Display).
YOUR MAC’S DISPLAY
There are a number of options in System Preferences > Accessibility > Display that allow the way a Mac presents text and images to be customized. As mentioned earlier, you can also tweak the interface to use less animation if you need to. Most options here are aimed at Mac users with a visual impairment. So, for example, you can invert colors or increase contrast. You can also reduce the transparency of windows.
If reading text in window titles is an issue, you can choose to show icons next to the title to make the window easier to identify, and you can also choose to have toolbar buttons outlined so they are clearer.
One of our favorite settings lives in the Accessibility > Display > Pointer tab. Select “Shake mouse pointer to locate” and choose a large pointer size, to ensure that you’re always able to find the pointer on screen. Just move your mouse around quickly or swipe quickly over a trackpad and the pointer grows in size so you see it clearly. You can also choose the outline and fill color for the pointer.
There’s one other setting that sits in System Preferences > Displays
rather than in Accessibility — Night Shift. If you use your Mac in the evening and have trouble sleeping, try turning on Night Shift. The idea is that by exposing you to a warmer light than the normal blueish light from your screen, your brain will be able to switch off afterwards.
ZOOM AND HOVER TEXT
The Accessibility > Zoom feature in macOS Monterey is extremely customizable. You can choose to have the whole screen enlarged when you zoom in, or choose the zoomed section to appear in a box, in what Apple calls Picture–in–picture. When you move the pointer around the screen, the box moves, like a square magnifying glass and displays an enlarged version of the section of the screen around the pointer.
You can also display the zoomed portion in Split View mode, so the magnified area is displayed in a bar at the top of the screen and when you move the pointer, the enlarged section of the screen moves with it. By default, the screen moves when the pointer reaches the edge between the normal–sized section of the green and the magnified section, which can be a bit jarring. However, you can change that by clicking Advanced and choosing an option from the top of the Appearance section. If you use two displays, you can have the magnified section on one display and the regular–sized screen on the other.
The Hover Text function allows you to hover over text and have it displayed at a larger size in a box on the screen near where the text is. By default, when you check Enable Hover Text in Accessibility > Zoom, you use the Cmd key to control the zoom. So, you press and hold on Cmd then move the pointer to where you want to zoom into the text. You can then use a trackpad or a mouse, to scroll up and down through the zoomed text. You can also change the default modifier to Opt or Ctrl by clicking Options. Those options also enable you to change the size and font for the zoomed–in text.
VOICEOVER, SPOKEN CONTENT AND MORE macOS provides three tools to help those with difficulty seeing or reading what’s on their Mac. The first is VoiceOver, which describes aloud what’s on your Mac’s screen. That could be the contents of a text document, web page, or window. When VoiceOver is activated, you can toggle it on or off using Cmd+F5 and move the mouse pointer to the section of the screen you want to be described. VoiceOver also enables you to control your Mac completely from the keyboard.
Accessibility > Spoken Content enables you to have announcements, selections, items under the pointer, or characters you type described to you by the Mac — you can choose the speed and volume. Descriptions (Accessibility > Descriptions) enables you to have the contents of visual media described, where the media creator has made that available.