How to Zoom into your Mac’s Display for Easier Reading

In this video, we’re going to look at the different zoom options we have on the Mac. With the Mac, what we can easily do is zoom into our display, maybe the text is a little bit small, and you want to zoom into that display. How can we do that? Well, let’s find out. Let’s go over to my Mac.

Now, one way of zooming in and out of your Mac is using the command plus and minus. But this only works with specific apps. As an example, let’s go over to Safari here. And now I’m going to go over to this page, what I’m able to do is use the Command key with the plus and minus to zoom in and out. So I hit Command plus zooms in or the text gets larger, it’s not actually zooming in to the page, hit Command Minus zooms back out or makes the text smaller. Well, that works great with Safari. But let’s say you’re in the Maps app here. And what you would like to do is read some of this text here, how do you zoom in.

If I hit Command, plus or minus, it’s actually going to zoom into the map. But the streets are still very small, the street names here are still very small. So what you want to do is you want to zoom in to make everything larger. Now one way of doing that is through a third party app, I use cursor Pro, and when I hold down the function key, we can see that it zooms in. So that’s a nice, easy way of doing that. But that’s through a third party app, we can also do it directly with the Mac. How do we do that? Well, basically, what we have to do is we have to turn this on in accessibility. So I need to go to my system settings. I’m using Mac OS Ventura. So we have system settings. If you’re using an older version of Mac OS, you can use System Preferences. This is not a Ventura only feature. So now what I’m going to do is go up to my Apple menu here, and then we go over to our system settings.

From here, what I need to do is go over to accessibility.

Under accessibility, let’s go ahead and close my maps for now. Under accessibility, you’re going to see we have zoom, this is where we’re going to turn on this feature. I select it. And we have a few options here. The first one is by using keyboard shortcuts. When I turn this on, what I’m able to use is keyboard shortcuts to zoom in and out, I use Command Option eight to turn it on and off. And then I use Command Option equals and minus or the plus and minus on your keyboard to zoom in and out. Let’s see how that works. So I’m going to use Command Option eight to turn it on Command Option eight. And we can see that my display immediately zoomed in. Now let’s say it zoomed in a little too far. Well, that’s where you use the command option minus and equals or plus and minus, so I’m gonna use Command Option and minus and you’re gonna see it zooms out. And then I go the equals or plus zooms back in.

When it is zoomed in, what we’re able to do is move our cursor to the edge, and then we can move around on the display. To bring it back to its normal size, we just use Command Option eight, and it brings it back. So that’s one way of doing it. Another way of zooming in and out is using trackpad gestures. I have a MacBook Air with a trackpad. So instead of using keyboard shortcuts, what I can use is a double tap with three fingers to turn it on and off. And then I double tap and drag to change the zoom level. So let’s go ahead and turn this on. And now I’m just going to double tap with three fingers. One, two zooms in, one two, zooms back out. Now what I’m going to do is double tap and then drag and watch what happens. I double tap turn it on, and I double tap and then I zoom in and out. I’m just dragging my fingers up and down. And I can easily zoom in and out. And then I double tap to bring it back to its normal size.

Now my favorite way is using a modifier key. This actually works the best at least in my case, I think it works the best. Let’s go ahead and turn this on. Now my modifier key that I’m going to use to scroll or zoom in and out is going to be the control key and I can change that. So I’m going to use the CTRL key that’s what I generally will use. So now all I need to do is just double tap with three fingers zooms in, and then if I hold down the control key and drag zooms in and out. We can see it’s zooming out. I’m just scrolling up on the trackpad like normal. But being that I’m holding down the control key, zooms in and out. I let go of the control key and then it turns into the normal scrolling

I hold down the Ctrl key, and I can zoom in and out.

So with this option here, what you’re actually able to do is leave zoom on all the time. And then what you’re able to do be in that design is just hold down the Control key, and you can drag with three fingers to zoom in and out. Let’s see what this looks like on the Maps app. Let’s go back over to the Maps app and see how this would work. I go over to my maps app.

And now I want to see the street names here. All I have to do because I have zoom on, all I have to do is just hold down the control key and I swipe up.

And I can zoom into those streets. I hold down the control key and I swipe down. And I zoom back out, we have one other option with our zoom controls. And that is hover text. When I turned this on, when I hold down the command key and then move my cursor over top of anything, let’s go over this text here. What it’ll do is it’ll show large text, it’ll zoom into the text. So I’m going to hold down the command key and we can see what it says there easily see what it says zooms into the text. Let’s go over to this text here, all I have to do is just hold down the Command key. Okay, I move my mouse. And now I can easily see what it is. So if you have a hard time reading the text, that’s another way of zooming and just to the text.

So those are different zoom options we have with the Mac, again, my favorite ways to just turn it on, and then use a modifier key. In my case, what I do is I just use the default control key, but you can go and change it if you wanted to.

This is all available in our accessibility settings. And this is not a Mac OS winter feature only feature. This has been available on Mac OS for a number of years, and you can easily find it in your System Preferences under Accessibility. This is actually a trick that I used quite a bit when I was at the Apple store about 10 years ago. If I needed to read the serial number, what I would do is I would go up to about this Mac, we have our serial number here. And if I can’t read it, all I have to do is just hold down the control key. And I can easily zoom in to read that serial number. When I’m done, I hold down the Ctrl key, I zoom back out.

So those are some different ways that we can zoom in to our display on the Mac. And why we may want to, we don’t always have to just use the command plus and minus or the command minus n equals to zoom in and out or make our text larger and smaller that works in specific apps. But it doesn’t work in like the Maps app, you want to zoom in to a specific app. You want to make everything larger. We can easily do that. By using these simple tricks. You can use a keyboard shortcut, you can use gestures. You can use a modifier key, which is my favorite way. And then of course you can also just zoom into the text with hover text. So those are some ways that you can zoom into your text to make things a little bit easier I should say. Zoom into your display on the Mac.