Making It Easier To Read And Type On Your Mac With Hover Text

Let me show you how a pair of features on your Mac could help you read and type text. 

Now if you always have trouble reading text on your Mac you probably should change the screen resolution to make everything a little bit bigger. Of course, you can do things in specific apps, like in Safari to enlarge the text. But if you only occasionally have trouble, like sometimes when there is text that is too small, there's a feature that could help out. It could help you when typing text as well.

So this is called Hover Text or Hover Typing. You find it by going into System Settings and then go to Accessibility. You'll see it right here under Vision. Go into Hover Text here and you'll see Hover Text, Hover Color, and Hover Typing. You can look at options for these by clicking the little Information Button next to each one.

For instance for Hover Text you can control the Activation Modifier, how you actually turn it On and Off. So by default it is set at the Command Key. You press the Command Key down and it will activate Hover Text. Release the Command Key and it goes away. But you could also set it to Triple-press in order to activate it and have it stick. Then Triple-press again to have it go away.

You also can set the Appearance. How big the text is, the font, the color, and other things. Let's see how it looks. I'm going to turn it On here and I'm going to go into another app. Like for instance let's go into a Finder window here. Let's say we want to be able to read the text here a little easier. So we can hold down the Command Key and it will activate Hover Text. By itself it doesn't do anything right away. But you start to move the Pointer and you see as you move the pointer over something it will show you that text but in this little box and much larger. So I can go over different things on the screen here and you can see it will show me what each one of those shows. So a little bit easier to read text. All I need to do to make it go away is release the Command Key.

Of course if I Triple-press Command, like that, now it is locked and it will just stay on. I don't need to press anything. So if you want that you can use it. Otherwise Triple-press and it will go away again. It works in a variety of different apps. So, for instance, here in Calendar it is a typical place where text could be pretty small. So you can hold the Command Key down and it will enlarge the text there. You can see it even gives you some more details than that are there on the screen normally.

In Numbers if you have trouble reading some of the text here you can use it there. Just keep holding the Command Key down and it will give you the text in a larger Font and sometimes more information. Like this is a formula result. A web browser, of course, is a key place where this could be needed because sometimes text varies greatly in size. So, for instance, if you wanted to read this paragraph here you can use it. Now notice how there's not enough space in the box to have all the text there. But if you use two-fingers on a trackpad or one on a magic mouse you can scroll inside this box here to read more text. If you scroll past the end it begins scrolling the webpage, as you would imagine. So just as an example of how this could be better than zooming all the text on the webpage or using a different screen resolution, a lot of times webpages will have text of different sizes. So, for instance, here at the bottom of this you've got some small text, very common on a webpage. So if you can read the regular text just fine and need to read the small text you can use Hover Text for that.

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Now in addition to making it easier to see text that you're reading, you can also make it easier to see text that you're typing. So, Hover Typing will work when you're actually typing new text. You can look at the settings here and you can see you can set a Text Size, Font, and other things. But also Text Entry Location. So you can have the box appear near where you're typing or always at a consistent spot on the screen. So, let's see how this works.

Here I am in Numbers, for instance. Maybe I want to make sure that I'm typing the right numbers. So when I go to enter something into a field here, maybe the text is a bit too small for that. So what I'll do is I'll turn on Hover Typing. So now in Numbers you can see as I'm typing I get this box here and I can clearly see what it is I'm typing here. So as I make changes I don't make a mistake. It just automatically appears anytime that I'm typing. I have to enter Typing Mode here for it to appear here.

Here in Notes it will automatically appear as soon as I have a text cursor somewhere and I'm typing something. A web browser is another place where maybe the text can be read just fine, but as soon as you start typing something in some sort of field or box you find that the text is too small. So Hover Typing comes in handy for that kind of situation too.

If you find the box is always getting in the way that's where Text Entry Location comes in handy. So you can set it to a custom location or say to a specific spot like the bottom right here. Now when I go to type you can see it appears at the bottom, which of course would be closer to my keyboard, so maybe it is a good spot for it.

Now, while Hover Text can be toggled On or Off by simply holding the Command Key or some other modifier key you set, Hover Typing is on all the time if you turn it On. However, you can make it easy to turn On and Off by going into Shortcuts and creating a new shortcut that uses the set Hover Typing action here. So you can have it toggle Hover Typing here. Let's call this Toggle Hover Typing and under Info here, so I can add a keyboard shortcut for this. I'll just use all the modifier keys and H to toggle it. Now here I am in Numbers and, say, I want to type something and it's too small. I'll just use that keyboard shortcut there and now it's On. I'll use it again and it will turn it Off. So if you only want it on some of the time having a shortcut like this setup can help.

But even if you only need Hover Text or Hover Typing occasionally it's good to know about this feature. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.