Posts Tagged with 'magnify-screen'

Woopid Video Tutorials For Access Topics

Wednesday, 05 November 2008 Supporters, Users, Information, magnify, zoom in, minimize typing, Speech to Text, speech commands, speech recognition, talk to your mac, voice commands, voice recognition, bigger print, enlarge text, large print, zoom text, cursor size, mouse cursor, pointer size, mac speech, beginners, magnify screen, zoom screen, screencasts, video tutorials and videos 2 Comments

Woopid is a website offering free short video tutorials on computer and gadget-related topics. Most of the tutorials focus on Mac computer topics, and there are many which are directly focussed on access related topics.

Increase The Text Size in Leopard - Seven short videos about increasing text size or screen magnification in different areas in Leopard.

Make Your Computer Easier to Use - Eight short videos on different areas of universal access.

You Speak, Computer Listens - Five short videos about the "command and control" style speech to text system built into OS X.

You can check out the topics covered by Woopid by seeing the different bundles on offer, or browse or search the whole library for individual titles. There are plenty of others which are also related in some way to access and assistive technology.

- Ricky Buchanan

Simple: Zoom in to see screen details more easily

Wednesday, 20 February 2008 Users, Vision Impaired, Information, zoom in, Simple, magnify screen and zoom screen 4 Comments

If you have a MacBook with a trackpad or a mouse with a scroll wheel, there's a very simple way to zoom in to see something small on the screen.

If you have a MacBook simply hold down the control key and slide two fingers on the trackpad up to zoom in, down to zoom back out again. This will only work on trackpads that recognise two-finger scrolling, anything purchased in 2005 or later should be fine.

If you have a mouse with a scroll wheel, hold down the control key and use the scroll wheel to zoom in and zoom out.

If you would like to turn this function off or change the way it works, open System Preferences - it's the fourth item in the Apple menu (the  shape) in the very top left corner of the screen as shown here:

Opening the Apple menu to start System Preferences

From System Preferences, select the "Keyboard & Mouse" pane. The relevant options are at the bottom of the "Mouse" section of that pane. You can see here, I've modified mine so it uses the command key instead of the control key:

The Keyboard and Mouse pane from System Preferences, showing options for zoom-scrolling.

If you want to explore further options for how the zooming behaves, try the "Options..." button just to the right. There's no need to save the changes - the behaviour changes as you alter your selections so you can try each one out.

- Ricky Buchanan