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.