Screen Magnifier: Zoom

Today we're going to look at the Mac's Zoom screen magnifier, which lets us make everything bigger on our screen.

Sometimes the print we're reading and the images we're viewing can just be too small. So it's great to have a quick way to bump up the size. And that's where Zoom comes in.

Zoom is the built-in screen magnifier on our Mac. And when it's on, we can make everything on the screen bigger and more readable. So let's get ready to zoom in and take a closer look.

To get started, we're first going to open the Apple menu. Let's head over to the top left corner of the screen, and we'll click on the Apple icon.

Next, we'll select System Settings from the menu. Or on your Mac, the option might be System Preferences.

And now we'll select Accessibility. On this Mac, it's in the left hand column. In the right pane, we now have several accessibility options. And under the Vision heading, we find Zoom. We'll select that, and all our Zoom settings open right up.

Zoom has a lot of settings to help us magnify the screen just the way we want to. So let's take a look at these features. On this Mac, none of the toggle switches have been turned on. And we'll need to do that before we can use the settings we want.

We'll start with the first one, use keyboard shortcuts to zoom. And we'll begin by clicking on the toggle switch to turn it on. There.

Now, let's look at how we can use different key combinations to zoom in and out on our screen. For the first key combination, we'll press Option + Command + 8. This means we'll press and hold our Option and Command keys together, then we'll tap the 8 key, then let go of them all. And this key combination will toggle zoom on and off. So let's try that now. Option + Command + 8.

And there it is. Zoom is on. And we can see everything on the screen got a little bigger. And what if we wanna make things even bigger? We'll hold the Option + Command keys down, and tap the key with the + sign as many times as we want.

Each time we tap it, the screen zooms in a little more. And then to zoom out, we'll hold down the Option + Command keys and press the - key, which is right next door. Each time we tap it, the screen zooms out more, and the texts get smaller again.

Now here's a tip. When we zoom in, we see a smaller part of the display just as if we were looking through a magnifying glass. To see more of the screen, we just need to move around using the trackpad or the mouse, like this. And as the pointer gets close to the edge of the screen, everything shifts so we can see more of what's on the display.

Next, let's turn Zoom off again using Option + Command + 8. Just so you know, the next time we turn it on, Zoom will automatically go to the same level of magnification that we had when we turned it off.

Now let's look at another Zoom option in our Accessibility menu, which is another really handy feature. This one says, use scroll gesture with modifier key to zoom. This option lets us press a key on our keyboard, that's the modifier key, along with a gesture on the trackpad or the mouse to decide how much to zoom in. So let's see how that works.

And first, we'll need to click on the toggle switch to turn this option on. There we are. For this feature, there's a dropdown menu that lets us choose which modifier key we want to use. We'll leave it set to the Command key. And now we can press and hold the Command key and slide two fingers up the laptop trackpad to zoom in, or slide two fingers down the trackpad to zoom back out, like this.

And if we want to use a mouse instead of the trackpad, it works the same way using the scrolling gesture. Just press the Command key and use the scrolling gesture on the mouse up and down to zoom in and out. That really makes zooming in and out so simple.

Okay, we've got Zoom up and working on the Mac. So we can choose the magnification that works best for us using our keyboard, trackpad, or mouse. And we've got a few more Zoom tricks to share too in our workshop on Zoom Style. So be sure to check that one out. Thanks for joining me today to learn more about Zoom. Until next time.