Windows Low Vision: Icons

Do you ever get tired of squinting to try and see the icons on your desktop? Wouldn't it be great if we can make them bigger? Well, I've got good news. With a few simple steps, we can customize the size of our icons so they're easier to see. Let's get started by moving to our desktop.

From anywhere on our computer, press the Windows key and the letter D for desktop. We have a couple of choices for our next step. We can either right-click on any blank area on our desktop, or we can use the keyboard shortcut Shift and F10. This opens a menu. You might hear this menu called a context menu. It contains shortcuts that help us use our computer more efficiently.

The very first item in our list is View, and that's the option we'll use today. Let's press the V for view to select it. Then we'll press the Enter key to open it. If you prefer to use your mouse pointer, simply select View, and it will open the menu. We see three different size options here, large, medium, or small. Medium is the default. Let's check out all three.

We can either use our arrow keys to move between each option, or we can select it with our mouse pointer. Now, I prefer large icons, so we'll start from there. We can see that they're pretty big. We'll open our menu again and select medium with our mouse pointer. As we can see the icons are smaller. Now let's go back to our menu and check out the last option small. Wow, they're pretty tiny, aren't they? We'll go back to the large size for comparison. There's quite a difference between the three sizes. It's a good idea to try out the different sizes to see which works best for you. Sometimes the best size might vary.

For example, when we've been using our computer for a long time and are experiencing eye fatigue, that might be the perfect time to choose a larger icon. To finish, let's have a look at one other way to change our icon size. When we hold down the Control key and push the scroll wheel on our mouse away from us, everything on our screen gets larger.

If our icons are a little too big, we can make them smaller by holding down our Control key and moving the scroll wheel toward us. I really like this option because it gives us more size options than the three sizes we just explored. By the way, this method not only enlarges the icons on our desktop, but also enlarges text, images, and web pages. It's a great way to make things bigger on the fly.

Today, we explored a couple of ways to change the size of icons on our computer. I'm Vikki Vaughan, and I thank you for joining me.