Zoom Magnifying Styles

Today, let's explore how to set up Zoom, our Mac screen magnifier, and how to choose the Zoom style and options we want. In another workshop in this series, we look at how to turn on Zoom and some of the cool features.

We also take a quick look at Zoom styles. In this workshop, let's spend a little more time exploring how to set up the three different Zoom styles and how to make them work just right for us.

We'll begin by going to the Accessibility menu, and to get there, we'll start at the Apple menu in the top left corner of the screen. Let's click on the Apple icon.

And when the menu opens, we'll select System Settings. On your Mac, it might say System Preferences.

Next, we'll select Accessibility. On this Mac, it's in the left column. In the right pane, we have several accessibility options, and under the Vision heading, we'll select Zoom.

Okay, now we can see the different Zoom settings. And down here in the bottom half of the window, we find Zoom's style. The dropdown menu shows which style our Mac is set to, and when we first come here, it's usually set to Full Screen, but we've got other options too. Let's click on the up and down arrows to open the menu.

And there, now we can choose from Full Screen, Split Screen, and Picture-in-Picture. Let's check out how each of these styles work.

We'll start with Full Screen, so we'll keep that setting where it is. And to turn on Zoom, let's use the keyboard shortcut, option + command + 8. That means we'll hold down the option and command keys. Then we'll tap the 8 key, and that's great. In fact, that's a good way to remember the Zoom shortcut. Zoom is great, it's option + command + 8.

In Full Screen, Zoom magnifies everything on screen. Right now, we can't see the whole window at once, but we can move the pointer around and when it gets to the edge of the screen, like this, the screen shifts so we can view every part.

As we learned in our Zoom magnifier workshop, we can also increase magnification using option + command + plus. And we can decrease magnification with option + command + minus.

For details on how to set the range for quickly zooming in and out with those commands, check out the resources.

Now, let's turn Zoom off and we'll use the same keyboard shortcut, option + command + 8. There, when we zoom back out, we can see the whole screen again.

Let's head back to the Zoom style menu and choose Split Screen. And we'll use our keyboard shortcut again to turn on Zoom.

There, this time we get a different view. With Split Screen, we have only part of the screen magnified and it shows in a window across the top.

When we move the pointer around the screen, the area near the pointer appears in the magnified window, like this. This feature is really helpful when you need to see part of the screen in a magnified view, but you still want to see the full layout of the document or webpage.

Let's move the pointer to the Zoom style menu, and we can see this section is magnified in the window at the top of the screen. And now, a quick press of our Zoom keyboard shortcut returns us to our regular view.

While we're here at the menu, let's take a look at our third option Picture-in-Picture. We'll select it in the menu.

Then we'll turn on Zoom, and there it is. With this option, we have a smaller window that magnifies part of the screen.

To use the Picture-in-Picture option, we'll move our pointer around the screen and that drags the zoomed-in window where we want it. It's almost like having a virtual magnifying glass that we can move around the screen to get a closer look.

All three of these styles are handy and you'll want to choose the one that's best for you, or you might want to use different styles at different times. For now, we're going to move our magnified window back over to the Zoom style menu and we'll set it back to Full Screen.

Like that, and once again, our keyboard shortcut turns off Zoom. Okay, now that we've taken a look at the three main styles, let's explore a few more ways to customize how Zoom looks, and to do that, we'll click on the Advanced button on the right side of the Accessibility settings window.

When the Advanced window opens, we're going to see a few different options depending on what Zoom style we've selected. We're looking at the options for Full Screen, and the ones we're focusing on today will be available no matter which style we've selected.

First, we have a heading that says Appearance, and the first option here lets us change how the zoomed image moves on our screen. We've been using the option that moves the zoomed image when our pointer reaches the edge, but there are a couple more options too. If you want to learn how these work, check out the resources.

Let's look a little further down in the Advanced settings window at the option called Smooth images. This is a switch that's either on or off, and we'll select on to make the images on our display less jagged around the edges as we zoom in and out.

And now, let's look at the last heading here in the Advanced settings called Follow Focus. If you are not finding this on your Mac, check out the resources for more info about the options available on your operating system. Follow Focus means you can have the magnified area move to where your cursor is and you can choose whether it should move there only when you're typing. This feature gives us a few different options, but we're just going to look at one called Follow keyboard focus. Let's check this out.

We'll start with the Follow keyboard focus menu, and let's click on the up and down arrows to the right so we can see our options. There, now we can select Never, Always or When Typing. Let's select When Typing, and we'll see what happens when we type. To do that, we'll look at a document and we just happen to have one open in pages.

Now, we'll turn on Zoom, and let's begin typing. Notice that as we type the zoomed area moves to where the cursor is. Right now, we have it set up so the place we're typing is always near the center of the screen, but we have options to keep our image from moving until it gets near or reaches the edge of the screen. We can even change how fast the display moves, which is really helpful, if our screen seems to be jumping around too fast when we're using Follow Focus.

Check out the resources section to learn more about these options. Wow, there really are a lot of ways to fine tune Zoom and use it how we like. Thanks for joining me today as we explored the three main styles we can choose from and how to tweak them a bit to make them just right for our needs. Until next time.