Enable Hover Text on the Mac

0:02
In this video, we’re going to take a look at what hover text is, as well as how we enable hover text. This is an accessibility option. Let’s see what I mean. Let’s go to my Mac. Now, let’s first take a look at what hover text is. I’ll show you how you enable it here shortly. I’m going to open up a new Finder window. So I go down to my Finder here, click on it, we have my new Finder window. Now what I can do is I can display large text of anything that is in this window. As an example, we have my folder here, Johnny Appleseed.

0:38
If I hold down the Command key, and then move my cursor over top of it, watch what happens. I’m holding down the command key to enable hover text, hold down the Command key, and then I move over top of it, we can see what it is and large text, what my cursor is overtop of in large text, Johnny Appleseed here, let’s go and move my cursor over to the search bar here. When I hold down the Command key, you do have to hold down the command key and then move the cursor, you’re gonna see it says search. Now if I keep holding down the command key, as I move my cursor around, you’re gonna see it just keeps floating different text around. Anything that my cursor is overtop of is going to be shown in large text there.

1:24
So that’s what hover text is, when I let go of my command key, it disappears. I want to see it again, I just hold down the command key and I move my cursor over top of what I want to see, I can see what it is. If I open up Safari, let’s go over to Safari here. And I go over to my sidebar button here. When I hold down the Command key, and I move my cursor over top of it, we can see it says Show Sidebar. So how did I enable this? Well, it’s in our System Preferences. So I’m going to close all my windows here. And then what we do is we go over to our System Preferences. So I go up underneath the Apple menu, and then we go over to our System Preferences. From here, what we need to do is we need to go to accessibility, this is an accessibility option. Select it. And now what we do is we go over to zoom. One of the options for zoom is enable hover text, all we have to do is just turn this on. And by default, when we press the command key, it’s going to display large text, it’s going to display large text of any item that is under my pointer under my cursor. So again, I’m going to hold down the Command key.

2:38
I move my cursor over here, and we can see it says enable harbor text, we do have a few options here. If I click on Options, what I can do is I can set the text size, let’s go and make it a little bit smaller here. So I’m just gonna go with 40 point, you want to make sure you hit Return to make sure that it enters it. And then we can also set our text font, the text entry location, as well as what the modifier key is, by default, it’s going to be the Command key. So now I’m going to click on OK, I did reduce the size here. So let’s see what this looks like. I go over to enable hover text, and I’m going to hold down the Command key because that’s my modifier key. And when I do, you’re gonna see that the text is just a little bit smaller. So that’s how we enable hover text on the Mac with hover text, what we’re able to do is display a large text view of any item that is under our cursor under our pointer. And the way that we do this, once we enable it is we just hold down the Command key, that’s the default modifier key, hold down the Command key, move our cursor around and then you’re going to see a large text view of anything that is underneath our cursor.

3:48
The way that you set this up is through the accessibility options or accessibility preference pane in our System Preferences. All you have to do is go to our zoom options and accessibility and enable hover text. You also do have a few options to adjust the size and what the modifier key is. So that’s what hover text is and how we enable it on the Mac.