Making the Display Easier to See

Today we're going to take a look at a couple of changes we can make in the display settings on our Mac to personalize the way the screen looks.

The Mac gives us a lot of options for making things larger on the screen, and we'll cover many of them in the rest of this series. But for now, let's just focus on our choices in the Displays menu.

Okay, let's get started by opening the Displays menu, and we'll start by heading to our Apple menu bar at the top of the screen. Let's look for the Apple icon in the top-left corner of the screen. We'll click on it, and the menu opens beneath it.

Next, let's find System Settings. Now, on some Macs, this may be called system preferences instead. Here on this Mac, we find System Settings, so we'll click on it to open it. We'll find Displays in the list on the left-hand side about halfway down the screen in System Settings, and we'll select it.

Now, your screen might look different from this one, but you'll still find Displays under System Settings or System Preferences.

We are in the display settings. This is one of the places where we can make the text and icons on our Mac a little bit bigger. Within the displays window, we'll notice a few options for the screen display that appear as boxes. Every Mac is a little different, so your screen might not look exactly like this one.

One box is labeled Default, and any boxes to the left of that, including the one labeled Larger Text, will make everything appear a little larger on the screen. So let's try it.

We'll choose the Larger Text box. Next, we've got a window asking if we'd like to change to Larger Text. We'll just click the Change Resolution button.

And now everything on the screen is a little bit larger. Now, the Larger Text option can make the formatting on some of our apps or webpages look a little out of whack. Maybe the words overlap a bit or appear bunched up. If that happens, we can always just change the display to the next smaller size. That's the box just to the right of Larger Text or we'll just go back to Default where we started out.

If we're looking at these changes and thinking the text is still too small, we have plenty of other ways to make the text as large as we need. We'll take a look at those in the workshops on the Mac's magnifier feature called Zoom, also in this series.

Now let's check out the next setting for brightness just below the text size display boxes. We can make the screen dimmer or brighter just by moving the slider control. The slider goes from the dimmest settings on the left to the brightest on the right. To make the display dimmer, we can just click where we want on the line to the left of the button.

So let's do it. We'll click on the line to the left of the button to dim our display. And to brighten the display, we'll click on the line to the right of the button. We can also click and drag the button to move it left or right until we find the brightness level that works best for us.

Now, let's make things a little brighter by dragging the slider to the right. Okay, on this computer we'll leave it right here.

And here's a tip. We can also change the brightness without even opening the displays menu. We can use our Mac's assistant Siri. We'll press and hold the command and spacebar keys and say dim the screen or brighten the screen.

To learn more about setting up Siri on the Mac, check out the handout in the resources tab by scrolling beneath this workshop.

So let's brighten the screen with Siri. We'll get Siri's attention by pressing and holding the command key and spacebar. Siri doesn't always give us a sound cue to let us know it's listening, but if we've set up Siri on our Mac and we're holding down the command key and spacebar, we can assume it is. Now, let's say brighten the screen.

Siri: Okay, I made it a bit brighter.

Narrator: Hey, great. Siri did it. How cool is that?

Okay, before we wrap up the display settings, here's a little tip. Down in the bottom-right corner of our displays window, we'll find a button with a question mark.

This is where we can find even more information about the settings we're working on.

Okay, that's a wrap on the Mac display settings where we made the text a little bigger on our screen and set the brightness where we want it. Thanks for joining in today to check out these cool features in the display settings. I look forward to seeing you next time.