Choosing Color, Contrast, and Size

Today, we're going to check out the display options in the accessibility menu. This is where we'll find some great features that let us personalize how our Mac shows colors and contrast, along with the size of the mouse pointer and cursor. Let's see how these display options in the accessibility menu work.

Our first step, is to head over to the Apple menu, so let's click on the "Apple" icon in the top left corner of the screen. And then, we'll select "System Settings," or, on some Macs, the menu option might be "System Preferences."

Next, we'll select "Accessibility," which we can find right here, in the left hand column. Okay, now our "Accessibility" pane is open and we find a few different headings with several options beneath them. We're going to look under the "Vision" heading. And here we find "Display." Let's click on "Display" to open it.

Great. This is our display pane. And we have a lot of options here in three main sections, "Display," "Pointer," and "Color Filters."

Let's take a look at each section and let's start with "Display." Beneath the "Display" header, we'll find a number of toggle switches that let us invert the colors, add some contrast, increase the size of our menus, and more.

Let's check out this option, to "Invert colors," which means changing all the colors on the screen to their opposites. We'll click here to turn on the toggle switch.

And how cool is that? We'll see a quick notification on our screen letting us know our settings have changed. Now we have white letters on a black background and that can make the text really stand out.

Just below that, we have two buttons that let us select which "Invert colors mode" we want, either "Smart" or "Classic."

These options let us choose how we want to view images and pictures on the screen when the colors are inverted. With "Classic," all of the colors on our screen are inverted, but if we select "Smart," this will show our photos with their original colors instead of inverting them, which is great when we want to enjoy photos from the family.

For now, we're going to turn the toggle switch back to the off position while we look at some other options. We'll see a quick notification on our screen letting us know our settings have changed.

Now, let's move down and check out the toggle switch to "Increase contrast." When we turn on that toggle switch, all of our windows and panes are now outlined with high contrast lines, so they stand out more. Turning on "Increase contrast" also switches on "Reduce transparency," which removes the transparent effect on some backgrounds.

Making these backgrounds a solid color is another way to improve the contrast on our screen and make things easier to read. And now, let's go down to the last setting under the display heading, which is called "Display contrast."

Here, we see a slider, and we can adjust the contrast by dragging the button to the left to decrease contrast, or to the right to increase it. Let's increase it a little bit. Okay, we'll see a quick notification on our screen letting us know our settings have changed.

Next, let's go down to the next heading and we'll make some changes to the mouse pointer. Our first option here is a really cool feature, "Shake mouse pointer to locate." Let's turn this toggle switch on and see how it works.

There we are. Now when we shake the mouse back and forth quickly, or move our finger back and forth on the track pad, like this, the pointer gets larger and easier to find. This is super handy when it gets lost in some background clutter on the screen, or we're just not sure where it is.

Next, we've got a setting for "Pointer size" with another slider. We can click on the slider button and drag it over to the right to make the pointer bigger. That's great.

And the final settings for the pointer will let us change the "Outline" and "Fill" color of the pointer. This is really great because we can choose colors that really make the pointers stand out, no matter what background it's over.

For each setting, when we click on the color rectangle to the right, our color options open up and we can click on the color we want to choose. Let's click on yellow for the outline, like this. And now, we'll go to the "Fill" color and let's click on black.

Now, wherever we move the mouse pointer, that really stands out. These are some great options and we've still got one more. Let's take a look at the last heading, "Color Filters." We'll find these settings just below the colored pencils.

First, we see a toggle switch to turn "Color filters" on or off. And below that, we have a dropdown menu that lets us choose our "Filter type." Let's look at the filter types first.

So, we'll click on the up and down arrows on the right, and the menu opens with several choices. We'll choose "Grayscale" for now to check it out. With "Grayscale" selected, let's go up to the "Color filters" toggle switch and turn it on.

Voila, we'll see a quick notification on our screen letting us know our settings have changed. All the colors on the screen change to shades of gray. How cool is that for anyone who has a sensitivity to color?

And these other options are handy too for people with different color sensitivities. And when we turn off the "Color filters" toggle switch, there we go. We'll see a quick notification on our screen letting us know our settings have changed. We're back to our regular color settings.

There's definitely a lot of fine tuning we can do here in the accessibility menu's display settings. We added some contrast to the display, inverted the colors, adjusted the pointers, so it really stands out on the desktop background, and explored the color filters.

Be sure to check out another workshop in this series on the accessibility shortcuts menu to learn how some of these same settings can be changed quickly, right from that menu. Thanks for joining me today to learn more about the display settings in the accessibility menu. Until next time.