Magnify Your Mac's Screen With the Zoom Accessibility Feature

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at the Zoom accessibility feature on your Mac. 

One of the oldest accessibility features on your Mac is the screen Zoom function. It is something that can help you if you have a vision disability. But really just about anybody who uses a Mac can benefit from this. What it does is it will magnify a portion of the screen so you can read text that is too small or perhaps work with pixels in a graphic's app. 

The way to turn this on is to go into System Settings and then Accessibility. You'll find Zoom here in the List. Go into that. Then you have to enable it with this switch here. Once you enable it, it doesn't turn it On right away. Instead it enables the keyboard shortcut Option Command 8 for you to turn it On. So I'll use that right now and you'll see it in action. 

What you get is this rectangle here that acts as a magnifying glass for what is under the Pointer. You can move the Pointer around as normal and you can see in the rectangle a magnified version of what's on the screen. So you could easily read text, even if it is very small and work with pixel precision. You can do everything that you can do normally this way. So if you want to toggle a switch, for instance, just go to the switch and click it. You can see how it works. You can move windows around. You can even access the menus the same way. You can adjust the Zoom amount. 

If you look here you can see the keyboard shortcut, Option Command and then the Plus or Minus keys, on your Mac's keyboard. They allow you to zoom out to make the magnification a little less or zoom in to make the even more. To toggle it Off just use the same Option Command 8 and it will go away. 

You can also use a trackpad gesture to turn this On and Off and scrolling on the trackpad will also allow you to zoom in and out. You can set a modifier key to handle that so it's not confused with regular scrolling gestures on your trackpad. You can also change the size of the magnification area. So you can click on Size & Location here and now you can drag the rectangle there. You can make it more of a square area and make it a lot smaller if you want to. Click OK. Now when you use it it's going to use that size right there. 

You also get to choose other ways that things are magnified. For instance you can choose Split Screen. Now a portion of the screen, in this case the right side here, will be used as the magnified area and the left portion of the screen will scroll back and forth depending upon where the Pointer is. You can work with things normally there. So you can work with items on the screen kind of normally while you still see a magnified portion. If you go to Size & Location here you can change how much of the screen is used for this and even drag the entire thing to the top, left, bottom, or right if you want. 

You can also go to Full Screen. When you do Full Screen the entire screen is used as the magnifying area. So you just see a portion of the screen. You can zoom in and out as before so you can have just a slight magnification like this. Then you can toggle On and Off just as normal. So a lot of people like to use the picture-in-picture version of this. But Full Screen is actually pretty useful as well especially if you just toggle it On when you need it and toggle it Off when you're done. 

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There are a ton of other options under Advanced. Which Advanced settings are shown depends on which Zoom style you have chosen. So for instance for picture-in-picture you've got the option here to keep the picture-in-picture window stationary. So now when you zoom in the rectangle stays in the same place. So, that brings into play this Button again where you can move the area here and change its size. So you can turn a portion of your screen into the magnified viewer there. I'll click OK and I'll turn zoom on and you can see I can interact with the rest of the  screen normally, my Pointer works just like it did before. But I have this zoomed version of what's under my Pointer at the top right there. There are lots of other options as well. 

For instance you can control how the zoomed area changes as you move the Pointer around here. You can have Zoom be on when you start up your Mac. If you're trying to read text with this then you probably want Smooth Images turned On. But if you're trying to work with graphics you may want to have it turned Off to clearly see the individual pixels. 

There's an option if you scroll down here, Toggle Zoom On & Off As Long As Modifier Keys are Held Down. So the defaults are Control and Option. So if you turn this On you can just use Control and Option to bring up your current zoom options and then just release Control and Option and it goes away. That's handy if you don't really use it very often. You just need to occasionally be able to read a small word or click on an exact spot. But as I mentioned the Advanced Settings available change if you've got another Zoom style on. So with Full Screen Zoom you're going to see different things here. For instance this setting here allows you to toggle between Full Screen and picture-in-picture with a keyboard shortcut. Another thing you can do is if you have Full Screen zoomed style you can choose a secondary display to be your magnifier. So your main display just looks and acts normally all the time but the secondary display that acts as the magnified area and you would just glance over at that screen if you ever needed to see things larger. 

So there are a lot of different options. If you've never used this before I encourage you to play around with it. Practice with the Option Command 8 to turn it On and then Off again. Try to use it to read small text as it comes up. Hope you found this useful Thanks for watching.