Speech on the Mac

Speech is one of the flashiest accessibility features. It’s something that can be helpful to a lot of people while making them feel like they live in a futuristic world where computers can talk to you.

You can find Speech settings by going to System Preferences > Accessibility > Speech

System Preferences > Accessibility > Speech

System Voice Options

You can choose from a variety of system voices via the drop down menu. Alex is the default. You also have Fred, Samantha, and Victoria. Fred and Victoria are classic mac voices and sound like it too. Meanwhile, Alex and Samantha are much smoother voices based off American English Accents.

The last option on this dropdown is customize. This brings up a lot more voice options to choose from. Select the ones that sound good and try them out. This option also shows different language options.

Speaking Rate

Speaking rate is is on a scale from slow to fast. Normal speaking rate is right in the dead center. Adjust this and hit the play button to sample the voice and rate together.

Now that you have your voice and rate set to where you think you like it, go ahead and highlight a chunk of text, right click, and choose speech > start speaking.

Enable Announcements

When you check this box it will speak to you every time there is a notification or if an application needs your attention. There is an option button that becomes available after you check the box allowing you to choose voice, phrase, and delay.

Phrase options include speaking which application needs your attention or a selection from the phrase list including excuse me or alert. You can also edit the phrase list if you were looking for a different alert such as “AMELIA! I NEED YOUR ATTENTION!”

Delay is how many seconds does it wait after the alert has appeared on the screen to speak it.

Click the play button to sample what that sounds like.

Speak Selected Text When Key is Pressed

Let’s you choose a key combination that will speak selected text when pressed so you don’t have to right click. Just another option.

 

 

 

Display Settings on the Mac

Apple Categorizes an array of vision accessibility features under the Display section of the accessibility menu.

To get there: System Preferences > Accessibility > Display

System Preferences > Accessibility > Display menu

There are a ton of options in this menu to make it easier to look at your mac screen so let’s dive right in:

Invert Colors

This option, when checked, will do exactly what you think it will… invert all the colors on  your screen – no matter what. This means grey becomes shades of black, blue becomes orange, orange becomes blue… etc. This includes pictures, buttons, and applications. The purpose is to make things easier to see especially if you have a hard time with certain colors.

Need another reason to turn this on? Try using this for night reading. This will invert black text to white while changing the white background to black making the screen of text easier to read in a dark room.

Use Grayscale

Grayscale will turn everything on your screen to a shade of gray. So if you are worried about colors, this is your off switch. It’s simple straightforward and extremely useful for those who have different colorblindness.

Differentiate Without Color

This makes subtle differences such and square and circle buttons to show the difference between them instead of (or in addition to) using different color. The main example was in messages when you set your status, away status would be depicted with a square instead of a circle so that those who are colorblind would have a visible difference. I haven’t seen any other solid examples of this… if you find one let me know.

Reduce Motion

Be careful, because turning this off after you’ve had it on will make you dizzy. Reduce motion is for those with vertigo or who are just really sensitive to things moving. There a lot of animations on the mac that those who aren’t sensitive to motion won’t notice. This such as switching between desktops (4 finger swipe left or right) or pulling up the notification center (2 finger swipe from the right edge). When reduce motion is turned on, instead of a swiping animation they fade from one screen to the next making it easier on your eyes and stomach.

Increase Contrast

Increase contrast adds extra definition to windows, buttons, etc. It creates black borders around everything to make it  clear what is a button and what isn’t. It also reduces transparency.

Reduce Transparency

The dock, the menu bar, and many other screens are normally transparent which means that some color from your desktop picture peaks through background of the menus, etc. For some people, this makes these menus harder to see. Checking reduce transparency will make the backgrounds solid taking out the transparency to make it easier to see

Display Contrast

This item is on a scale from “Normal” to “Maximum”. Instead of creating defining lines around buttons and screens like increase contrast does, this increases the brightness of the white and darkness of the black to edit the extremes. It greatly effects color and defining lines. This makes some things easier to see and others more difficult so it will certainly need adjustments to find the right spot for you.

Normal

Grayscale

Increase Contrast

Reduce Transparency

Cursor Size

Changes the size of your cursor. This can make it easier to see and easier to find. From “Normal” to “Large”, you’ll have to adjust the scale to find what works best for you.

Shake Mouse Pointer

This is a newer feature, when you shake your cursor with this item checked, it will increase in size temporarily to help you locate it. This can be handy for anyone, especially those using multiple monitor or large screens where it’s easy to lose your mouse.

 

Zoom on the Mac

Zoom is an easy helpful feature for those who find themselves squinting at their computer screen.

Zoom isn’t for everyone. There are a lot of options to customize zoom to work for you but not everyone has to go so far. For example, Safari has built-in zoom keyboard shortcuts that zoom the safari windows only. Command – Shift – Plus sign to zoom and Command – Shift – minus sign to zoom out. So if you are only looking to zoom safari then stop here. But if you are looking to expand your zoom horizons, then by all means continue.

To Find Zoom Settings on Your Mac:

Go to System Preferences > Accessibility > Zoom

Zoom Basics:

• Any of the zoom options will follow your cursor when zooming so try to point at the area of the screen you want to zoom in on before hitting any of the zoom in or out buttons.
• Toggle in computer terms means on/off switch. So Toggle zoom means it will turn zoom on or off.
• Practice makes perfect, there are a lot of different settings so try some of them out and pick what works best for you

Setting Yourself up for Success:

Using Keyboard Shortcuts

When you check the box next to “Use keyboard shortcuts to zoom”, it will immediately give you the option to zoom using those keyboard shortcuts at any time.

Remember that the crazy squiggly line is supposed to mean the option key (think of it like a fork in the road: 1 path give you 2 Options) and the four-leaf clover is supposed should match the command key.

For a full list of keyboard shortcuts on the mac check out apple support.

Using scroll gesture to zoom

I find most people either gravitate towards using keyboard shortcuts or scrolling. I find merits in both options, so try both options and see what works best for you.

When you check the box next to “Use scroll gesture with modifier keys to zoom”, there is a drop down menu that will come to life with 3 options for you. The idea is you hold down either the Control, Option, or Command keys while scrolling with your mouse or trackpad to zoom in or out.

Pros:

• You can zoom in or out faster and a little smoother than when using keyboard shortcuts.
• You don’t have to memorize keyboard shortcuts.

Cons:

• There is no quick “stop zooming and go back to normal” button option. This is where having the keyboard shortcuts and scroll options both checked comes in handy. So when you have scrolled too far and have no idea what is normal you can use option – command – 8 to go back to normal.

Smooth Image

No, this option does not make your images feel smoother so stop petting your screen. When you check this option it will make your images look smoother as you zoom in. Once you start really zooming in close on pictures or even words you will notice a breaking point where everything starts to look really boxy or pixellated. This option helps keep things looking a little less boxy and a little closer to what you want them to be but it can only do so much.

If you want to understand what smoothing really means, I recommend turning on the keyboard shortcuts and zooming in on a picture. I mean really zoom in. Once you are sufficiently zoomed in, use option – command – \ to toggle the smoothing feature. This will let you see the difference for yourself.

No Smoothing

Smoothing

The above picture shows the result of smoothing. Picture on the left has no smoothing while picture on the right has smoothing option turned on.

Keyboard Focus

When we talk about focus, we are talking about what your anchor point is for zooming in or out. By default it follows the focus of your cursor. This means that when you zoom in it is trying to zoom in on where your cursor is instead of just what is in the middle of the screen, for example.

When you check the “Zoom follows the keyboard focus” option, you’ll notice that nothing changes for normal zooming in and out. As soon as you start typing on a field, however, the zoom will automatically move to where your text is being entered. For example, if I clicked on the search bar at the top of safari like I was going to type and then zoomed in on the opposite side of the screen, it would let me but as soon as I start typing it would redirect the zoom to the field where I was entering text.

It makes sense and can be super helpful when I want that but it’s not always what I want. What if I am trying to type the name of a restaurant that I can’t spell so I move my zoom to the restaurant name and try to look at that while typing but it keeps moving back to the text field, for example? Then having keyboard focus isn’t a good option. The other thing to keep in mind is that it can make you seriously dizzy. I am super sensitive to that type of movement so I find it terribly disorienting but at the same time, I don’t use it every day so maybe that’s just an adjustment.

Zoom Style

Zoom style works with either keyboard shortcuts or scroll zooming. This gives you 2 options:

1. Full screen: Your entire screen zooms.
2. Picture in Picture: a rectangular box appears when you zoom. Only the area in the box zooms. The box will follow your cursor. Think of it like a magnifying glass that you are moving around the screen.

Both styles can be helpful, try them both and pick what works best for you.

Options

Finally, the last thing to talk about! The options button does just what you think it does, gives you more options. Now most of these options are more than what you would normally need but they are there just in case.

I’m just going to mention 2 options that I didn’t expect:

1. Invert Colors: this option, when checked, will invert the colors on your screen every time you zoom. That can be super handy for people who find inverting colors can make it easier to see something. This is also handy for reading in a dark room because the background turns black and the font turns white which means less blue light in your face.
2. Speak items under mouse after delay: Check the box and adjust the delay to turn this feature on. Anytime you zoom and place your cursor over text it will wait a moment and then speak the text out loud.