15 Ways To Make Text Easier To Read On Your Mac

If you ever have trouble reading text on your Mac because it is too small, there are many ways to adjust text in different places to help. You can make a universal change by adjusting your display resolution, use helper features like Accessibility Zoom, or change the display size for text in apps like the Finder, Safari, Mail and more.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you the many different ways you could make text easier to read on your Mac.
MacMost is brought to you thanks to more than 600 viewers just like you. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you can read more about the Patreon Campaign. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts.
So if you find that text is sometimes too small on your Mac to be able to read there are a lot of different options that you have for making it larger. Some are universal and work across all apps and all situations. Others are for specific apps. Let's start off by looking in System Preferences and going to Displays. This is going to give you ultimate control over the size of text on your Mac but it comes with a downside. You go here to Displays and under Display I can set the resolution to something other than Default. Now you may see something different here depending upon what Mac you have and what screen is attached to it. 
But in most cases you'e going to be able to choose larger text or more space or something in-between. Now, of course, the downside to larger text is less space on your screen for windows and icons and graphics and other things. But text will be larger. So if you're having trouble reading text across all apps and in all situations you probably would want to go with something like larger text. In the past there was also a quality issue. If you went with anything except the default then one pixel wasn't exactly one pixel and things would look fuzzy. But since Mac has been using retina displays, high definition displays, for awhile now this isn't as bad. So try one of these if you just need to change text across everything on your Mac.
Now you have other options in System Preferences as well. If you go to Accessibility there are a few things in here that will make text easier to read. First go to Zoom. If you turn zooming on you can zoom in on a certain portion of the screen. So I'm going to first turn it on using Keyboard shortcuts. So you can see the default shortcut is Option Command 8. If I use that you can see I get this rectangular area under the cursor that zooms in on everything. It's a little disorienting at first but you get used to it really fast and can use it. It certainly makes text easier to read.
There are a lot of options as well. For instance you can choose Zoom Style. Instead of picture-in-picture I could do full screen so the entire screen is zoomed in. You can choose Split screen as well and decide what part of the screen is zoomed in here. It's the bottom but I could click on Advanced and I could go to Adjust Size and Location and move it to the left side or the right side. Adjust the line here. When in picture-in-picture I could adjust the size of this as well under Advanced to make it a smaller area or whatever I want. You could add things like Invert colors, Smooth images including smoothing text to make it even easier to read stuff under there. There are tons of different options so if you ant to use that you definitely want to take the time and go through all of these different options. Try them out and optimize this feature for your needs.
Another option, right here on the same screen, is Hover Text. So with Hover Text you can press the Command key to display a large text view of what's underneath the cursor. So, for instance, if you have trouble reading this text here I could hold the Command key down. Sometimes it helps if you move the cursor a little bit and you get a large view of what's there. You can do that with just about any text on the screen and it even works in the web browser. You have options like the size of the text and the font, where the text appears and how to have it activated. You can even go and set colors for it. 
Also here if I go to Speech there are two ways to have text spoken. One is Speak Selected Text when a key is pressed so I'll select that. Option Escape is what is used. So I can go here in Safari and I can select some text here and then do Option Escape or I could turn that off and turn on Speak Items Under the Pointer and have it set to only when zoomed or Always. If I set it to Always it's just going to read whatever is under the cursor. I can set this to be a bit of a delay so if I keep moving the cursor it won't happen. This will even work in Safari.
Now let's start looking at specific apps. Here I am in the Finder and it would be nice to make text easier to read here. So if I wanted to see a file name larger what I need to do is go to View and then Show View Options or 
Command J and it brings up this control here which always includes something for text size. I can increase the text size like that and you can see the names for everything increase. It's different for different views. So I go to List View here and I've got text size and you can see I can increase it there as well. Column View also has the ability to increase it.
Now if you want to increase what's in the Sidebar and other parts of the Finder you could do that by going to System Preferences and then under General there's a way to do that right here under Sidebar Icon Size. So I can change that to large. Not only will the icons get larger but the text as well. This will also change the sidebar text in apps like Mail as well.
Now you have tons of options if you want to read text in Safari to make text larger by going to View and then Zoom In and Out so it's just Command + which is really Command and the equals key and that makes everything larger. Command minus makes everything smaller. If you were to hold down the Option key you'll see this changes to make text bigger and text smaller so it keeps images the same size. So Command Option and the equals key will make the text larger without changing the size of the images.
Of course another great way to make text easier to read in Safari is to use Reader View. You just go to something that's an article and click here and it brings up Reader View and then you have all sorts of controls to make it easier to read articles and other content online. Just remember to turn it off here because you won't see navigation, elements, videos, other things if you have Reader View turned on.
Now you would think that Command and equals would make text bigger in just about any app and in a lot of apps it does. So here in Mail I can use Command and equals to make things bigger. You won't find it under View though. Strangely in Mail you find it under Format and then Style and you'll see Bigger and Smaller there. 
Now in Pages, Numbers, and Keynote you could just make text bigger by selecting the text and changing the font size. But that actually changes the size of the font in the document. You don't want to do that. You just want to get it easier to read on the screen. Not necessarily change how the document looks. You've got a zoom control here in the Toolbar. That's what will enlarge the entire document. You can use View and Zoom and Zoom In and Out. It's not Command Plus or Minus here. It is Command Greater than or Less than which actually is Command Shift and then period or comma. This will zoom in or zoom out so you can see things a little bit better in Pages, Numbers, and Keynote.
How about the Productivity apps. Well here I am in Notes and you can actually use that greater than and less than shortcut here to increase or decrease the text size. So it's the same as Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. Not the same as Safari and Mail. You can see it under View and then Zoom In or Zoom Out. It actually shows it here as Shift Command period and Shift Command comma instead of greater than or less than.
You have an option to make the text larger in Calendar as well. Unfortunately it doesn't make things like numbers or any other elements larger. Just the text of events. So here you can see I've got two events. Go to View and Make Text Bigger or Smaller. This is going to use the Plus or Minus. So Command and equals will make things bigger and minus will make it smaller.
Now unfortunately Reminders doesn't include any way to change the font size. Reminders got a major overhaul in macOS Catalina so it's likely things like that were left out for now. Perhaps in the next version of macOS we'll see more features like the ability to change the text size. Contacts also doesn't seem to have any way to change the text size. Which is unfortunate. But there is a neat thing that you can do to see telephone numbers in some other field. If you click on the field name, like Main here for the main phone number, one of the options is Show Large Type and it will put it all the way across the screen. This is to make it easier to dial on your phone.
There is one last place I want to show you where you can make text larger or smaller. If you go to Help and bring up any kind of help on the Mac you have various text that help things in just about any app. It would be nice, sometimes, to be able to view this text larger. But there is no actual menu bar. This is kind of a floating window without it's own menu bar. Sure enough, Command and Equals will increase the font size. Command and Minus will decrease it. 
Now I know one of the things that people will ask is how can I make the text in the Menu Bar larger. There's no way to just adjust the font in the Menu Bar. So I have to go with my first suggestion which is to change the screen resolution. Chances are if the Menu Bar text is too small to read then you're probably having trouble in other areas as well. So it makes sense to adjust the resolution to make the text easier to read across all apps.

Comments: 3 Responses to “15 Ways To Make Text Easier To Read On Your Mac”

Ronnie West

3 years ago

Very useful but, needs to be relaxed a little because you are speaking much to quickly.

Dan Castrellon

Agree with Ronnie West. Presentation is way too fast. Please slow down just a bit, especially with moving the cursor around to various points. Information is very useful, after I viewed it over and over times.

Jenny Lee Wax

Thank you. I have been hating this mac display for text--needed to see a blacker font (not gray) and more contrast. Finally with your instructions and found "brightness" and that was a miracle for me! Can't remember if I unchecked "default" first or if "brightness" just showed itself to me. lol

Comments Closed.

15 Ways To Make Text Easier To Read On Your Mac

Comments: 3 Responses to “15 Ways To Make Text Easier To Read On Your Mac”

Welcome to MacMost

Free Weekly Newsletter

MacMost Online Courses

Keyboard Shortcuts PDF

Connect with MacMost

MacMost Sections

Popular Tutorials

Information