ACCESSIBILITY

Stop Squinting or Fumbling for Your Glasses: Zoom Magnification on Apple Devices

Take control of Zoom

There is so much more than this! Screenshot by author

When I worked at an Apple retail store for a few years after retiring, I’d often see customers adjust text size using settings for Display and Brightness as shown in the screenshot here. Almost everyone knew how to do that; very few knew that there are much more and often better built-in tools. This is true for Apple computers, iPhone and iPad, Apple Watch, and even Apple TV; I will cover all of those here.

Is zoom too complicated? Is it just one thing you need to magnify? Take a screenshot and then you can use pinch in Photos.

On macOS

I’ll start here because that’s the easy one. Mac System Preferences has an Accessibility section that does offer Zoom.

Mac Zoom — Screenshot by author

I don’t use it. While it does offer good control and the ability to have full screen zoom, a floating window zoom, and split screen zoom, that’s overkill for most of us. Without changing a thing in System Preferences, you already have the ability to zoom in and out: Holding Command and tapping “+”…