Mac Tips for Individuals with Dyslexia and Other Learning Challenges

 This is Gary with MacMost. Let's take a look at tips for using your Mac if you have dyslexia or other learning differences. 

Your Mac has a variety of different features and options if you have dyslexia or other learning differences. These can help you reading and viewing content and also while writing. Now I'm not an expert on dyslexia. But there are a lot of different features here and I imagine that each individual can be helped by different features. So these are all probably worth giving a try to see if they will help you. 

Let me start by showing you some tips to make it easier to read on your Mac. First, when reading there are several different ways to have your Mac be able to read text to you. For instance you can be at a webpage or reading any document in any app really, and you could select some text and then if you go to Edit and then Speech you can select Start Speaking. The text will be read aloud. (Sample reading: the kit fox .......). You also have this set of controls here. Go a little faster, go a little slower. You can Pause like I just did or you can stop completely and dismiss these controls like that. Now if it seems like it may be hard to select that Menu item each time you want to use this, well there is a keyboard shortcut that can be used instead. To access that go to System Settings and then go to Accessibility. Then look for Spoken Content. The feature here is Speak Selection. You can see I already have it turned On. If I click the little information button here there's a keyboard shortcut. You can set it or just use the default, Option Escape. This is the same as choosing that Menu item. 

Notice that you can also choose a lot of other things here. For instance you can have the content highlighted by Words, Sentences, or both. You can have the word color set to something else, the Sentence color and the sentence style whether it is a background color or underlined. So with everything set like this I can select text, just like I did before, use Option Escape (the kit fox......) and I get the controls right here and it works just like I selected the Menu item. Notice here how it has highlighted the word that it is on so I can follow along really easily. 

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There is also another item, under Spoken Content, and that is Speak Item Under the Pointer. So this will be a lot more verbose. Always talking to you. But if you turn this On (Speak item under the pointer. Speak selection. Speak announcements.....). So it just keeps reading text to you, whatever is under the pointer. You do have some controls here. For instance, you can have it wait a long time for you to leave the pointer where it is before it starts talking and how often it is actually triggered. 

Now if you find the problem is often that the text is just too small, whether in apps or in webpages, usually there is a Zoom feature and it is usually under the View Menu. Go to View and there is Zoom In and Zoom Out. Notice it is Command and Plus or Command and Minus. Plus is actually the equals key on US keyboard. So if I were to use that you can see everything gets bigger, including the image here on the right. I can always use Command and zero to go back to the default size. It's good to know that here is also a way to only increase the size of the text. If I go to View and look at Zoom In and Zoom Out but hold the Option Key I can see it's Make Text Bigger and Make Text Smaller. This is a special feature of Safari. So if you just use the keyboard shortcut, Option Command and Plus notice the picture of the fox there stays the same size. A lot of webpages will work better and look better when you use this rather than zooming everything. But know that if you are using a trackpad you can simply use two-fingers and pinch outward, like that, and you can zoom in the entire page. It doesn't really change how the page is laid out, it just basically magnifies a portion of it and then you can use the trackpad with two-fingers to move around. 

But if you find text is too small just about everywhere in every app maybe even buttons and other objects are too small as well I encourage you to go into System Settings and then go to Display. Then try these different display resolutions. Don't worry about what you may have read about which one is optimal for performance and such. The optimal one is really the one that works best for your eyes. So, try these. Also Control Click, two-finger click on a trackpad or right click on a mouse on this and select Show List to see more options. You can also select Show All Resolutions here to see more. Try to avoid the ones that say Low Resolution. They won't use all the pixels on your screen. But any of the other ones could be just fine. Try it out. Don't listen to what somebody else says about one not being the best. If it works for you and makes it easier for you to use your Mac, then use that resolution. 

Also, if you go to Accessibility and then you go to Display you've got the option here to change the text size. I'm going to bring up this Finder window here so you can see some regular elements and note if I go into Text Size here there's a default one for All Apps, or at least the ones that will obey the setting. Then there are individual ones for some of Apple's built-in apps. So, for instance, in the Finder I can actually change the default size and it won't affect other apps. I can make the text bigger. You can see how it jumped in size there like that. But notice if you use the Slider here it changes lots of other things including the text here in the Sidebar of the Finder. So, play around with these settings for different apps to be able to read the text better. For instance, it could be really useful in Calendar where people often complain that the text too small. 

Another Accessibility feature here is Zoom. Go into that and turn that On. You can use Option Command 8 to turn it On or a variety of other ways. Like there's a trackpad gesture and such. You can turn this On and one way to use it is to have this box here that allows you to basically magnify whatever is under the pointer. You can turn it Off with the same keyboard shortcut. You can also use the Option Command Plus, Option Command Minus when you have these on and they will turn it On and make the Zoom level bigger or smaller there. In addition to Picture-In-Picture you can also Split the screen between the zoomed area and the regular view or just zoom the entire screen all at once. There are a lot of different options here for how to activate it and how it works once it is activated. The great things about this is that it is very easy to zoom On and Off. So you can have zoom Off most of the time but when you need to focus on a particular part of the screen and you find that you have trouble reading the text there you can turn it On just to read that text and the quickly turn it back Off. 

There is also another feature called Hover Text. When you turn this On then you hold the Command key, like it says here, and it will show the text underneath the pointer like that. So here you can, for instance, read this text while holding the Command Key down and moving the pointer and you can see the text appears there larger. You can then use two-fingers on your trackpad or mouse and scroll if the text is too much to fit in that space. Then just release the Command key and it goes away. 

But also in Safari, remember you always have Reader View. To do it in Sequoia you can click here and choose Show Reader or you can simply use the keyboard shortcut, Shift Command R. Then you go into Reader View which is great because not only can you make the text easier to read but it gets rid of a lot of the distractions. Click here again and you see you can choose the background color, you can choose the Font, you can choose the zoom level. So you can really change how the text looks to make it easier for your to read. Also if you go to Safari, Settings and then you go to Websites you can change the Reader View defaults for different sites. For instance here I've got WiKipedia open so I could actually have this customized. Turn it On so Reader View always turns on whenever you're reading an article at that site. 

A great new feature in macOS Sequoia is Distraction Control where you can get rid of different elements that are on a page. So you click here, like you're going to Reader View, and you click Hide Distracting Items. Then you can click on an item and, let's say the Sidebar wasn't a sidebar but instead like an ad or some other element that was distracting while you were trying to read. Click and it goes away. It should stay away on this page although ads typically come back as different ads rotate in and out of the webpage. But at least for the time being you've got a quieter page where you can focus on the text. 

Now let's talk about writing. When you're writing in macOS Sequoia you've got some great text prediction tools. Look what happens when I try to write some text here in Pages. Notice how I started typing the word morning and you can see in gray the rest of the word is there. I don't need to type the rest of the word. I can simply press the spacebar since that is what I want after morning and it will finish the word or I can use a punctuation mark. So if there's actually supposed to be a comma after this I can type the comma right now and it finishes the word and then puts the comma. Notice here it is doing is again and I can type a space or a period here and it will finish it for me. Sometimes prediction will even go two or three words in advance. But you can always just keep typing if it is not predicting what you want. It will only apply itself if you press space or some other punctuation mark indicating you want to move on to the next word right now. 

Apps like Pages and many other places where you type text on your Mac also come with Spell Checker and a Grammar Checker. You can make sure they are on by going to Edit and then going to Spelling & Grammar. If you have Checked Spelling While Typing and Check Grammar With Spelling these will be On and they will show you when it thinks it finds a mistake. So let's try something with a grammar mistake in it. Notice how there's a green line under the word it's because that's a grammar mistake. This should be its without the apostrophe. So I can correct it like that. Then the green will go away. The same thing if I have a spelling mistake, like this. You can see I get a red underline there indicating that the word is not in the dictionary and I can correct it. But I could also go back to Spelling & Grammar here and Correct Spelling Automatically. So in this case notice how it finds the spelling mistake and corrects it. It won't always know what the right word is so it is not always going to correct it automatically. But it will take care of a lot of the spelling mistakes. 

Now depending upon what app you're using you also have a lot of other options to make it easier to write. For instance if the text seems too small you can simply zoom in at a higher level. So here in Pages I can go to, say, 150% and then I can kind of recenter the page there or maybe just set the window to Fill the space, like that. It might be much easier to write like this, but I haven't really changed the style of the font here. You can see it is still Times Roman 15 point. So if this is a paper I'm doing for school or a report for work I don't have to do anything to change the font back. But a lot of people prefer to write with certain fonts and sizes and you can certainly do that. Pages makes it really easy. So, for instance, here if I select all the text in this first paragraph and let's say I find it easier to write with a Mono spaced text like that and maybe a little bit bigger size and maybe even change the color to something I like better, like that and I like writing like that notice how Body Text is shown here with an asterisk next to it. I can Update and now all of the body text style in Pages is set to be like this. So now I can write my entire document and when I'm done I can simply change the body text style back and then apply it to all the paragraphs, just like I did before. So I can have basically a writing mode that I'm in and a finished document mode later on. If I like writing like this I can actually save this as a template. So, for instance, if I was just writing some sample text here and now I wanted to clear that out but I still have the body text set to this style I can now set this up to Save as a template and I can add it to the Template Chooser, give it a name like that, and I can also go into Pages Settings and set that up to use this template from My Templates, like that, and now that is my default template. My Blank Document. So every new Pages document I create will start that way. If this helps you write I encourage you to use Pages to do your writing even if the text isn't meant for Pages. Like maybe you are filling out a form online, or you are going to send an email, or a text message. You can copy text from Pages after you have written it, like this, and let's say I want to paste it here into a email. If I just do a regular Command V notice it uses that same font style. But instead I'm going to use Paste & Match Style, which in most apps is Option Shift Command V. When I use that it will pick up the style here from the email message. In other words it can invert the text to plain text and then pastes it in without any of the styling from before. So I could do all my writing like this in Pages, maybe even to have a scratchpad document open all the time where I do the writing, and then I Copy and then I Paste it like that into Mail, Messages, forms online, and other documents. 

Now there are a few things in System Settings that could help your write as well. If you go to Accessibility and then you go back to Spoken Content, where we were before, and this time look for Speak Typing Feedback, Get Info on this. You can see you can echo the characters that your type or the words or both and also tell you selection changes and modifiers keys as well. So let's just have it set to Words. So with that turned On I can go here and type (the quick brown fox) and you can see with that feedback might make it easier for some to write. 

There's also something under Hover Text called Hover Typing. Get Info on that and you have all the settings here for size, style, and all that. Here's what it looks like when you use it. You can see here I'm in the middle of typing something and it enlarges that and puts it in the middle of the screen. This is really useful when you can't control the size of the text. Like maybe you are filling out a form online and the text is particularly small. You can then rely on this to see what it is you're typing even though you may not be able to see it as well here. 

Of course there is also dictation. It's important to note that your Mac has two different types of dictation. One type you'll find in Keyboard Settings. Go there and you'll see Dictation. Turn it On and you can set how you want to activate it. Like, for instance, here Press Control Key twice is what I've got. But there are a bunch of different options you may have selected. When you do this you can basically dictate one sentence or phrase at a time. Like this: the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog period. Then you use that same control to turn it Off. It works really well. But if you need something more, more control over where the cursor is and being able to change words and things like that you want to go to the more advanced type of dictation. That is under Accessibility and you want to go to something called Voice Control. If you turn Voice Control on you'll see this control up here and you can have it Stop Listening, Start Listening, and all of that with that control. But also you have a ton of different commands. So, I'll click on Commands here and you can see here there are a bunch of basic things like Navigation and such. But if you scroll down you'll find a whole bunch that has to do with Dictation. For instance, for Text selection. You can select things, like select the previous word or previous sentence. You can also use Text Navigation, like Move Left, Move Right, Scroll Up, Scroll Down, Move to the end of the line. That kind of thing. You can Edit text with Correct That, Redo That, Undo That. You can Capitalize Upper Case. There are all sorts of commands here. You can always select one and get examples on how to use each of these things. There's a ton of stuff to learn. It's way more complex but it does allow you to do full control. If you train yourself to use this you can basically dictate instead of typing.

So I've got this turned On now. I don't have to activate dictation as long as I have this Listening it will just take what I say as dictation unless it understands it as one of those commands. (The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog period. New line this is the next line period. Select brown, green lower case that) So you can see there's a ton you can do with it once you learn all the different commands. 

Here's some other tips that can help both reading and writing. Notice that there is a default highlight color when you select something. Like it is kind of this orange here in Pages and if you go into the Notes App notice that it's a yellow. You can change that by going to System Settings and then go to Appearance. If it sets to multicolor that each app has its own highlight color. But if you'd rather it be a consistent color between all of them you can change the accent color to one of these and then the highlight color to something else. So let's, for instance, change it to green here. Notice that now it's green in both Notes and Pages. Also, under Accessibility you can go to Display. There are a bunch of things to change how Display works. Now you won't see it here in this screen recording but try these on your own. One thing you can do, of course, is Invert Colors. Another thing you can do is Increase Contrast or Reduce Transparency without increasing contrast. You can also go down to the bottom here. There are color filters. So you can turn this On and then select the Filter Type. If you select a Color Tint you can actually change the tint here and select a different  color. So, you may find, for instance, tinting the screen or having it be black and white might make it easier to read or write. 

You also, of course, under Appearance have Light and Dark mode. You can choose Auto which will switch to Dark Mode at night. But a lot of people prefer using Dark Mode all day long. So you may want to check that out. Of course in some apps here, like you can see in Pages, if you've chosen the page background color to be white, which is the default and the text color to be black then that is not going to change how this works. But in other apps, like for instance in Messages here or in Mail, it does change that. 

Also in Accessibility is something that doesn't change the screen at all. But it does help some people concentrate on either reading or writing. Go to Audio and then here you can turn On Background Sounds. You can choose the sound. So you've got some general noise sounds here and you also have some things that imitate, say, ocean noise, rain, and such. So you can download any or all of these and then turn this On, set a volume, and it basically acts like a noise machine either coming out of your Mac speakers or maybe if you've got headphones or AirPods in. This feature is designed to help people concentrate. So you might want to see if it works for you.

So there are a ton of different ways to help people with dyslexia, other learning differences, or just looking to concentrate more on what they are reading and writing on their Mac. I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.