Section 128. Zoom In

128. Zoom In

SEE ALSO

24 Add a Second Display

129 Choose How the Computer Alerts You

Zoom is a feature that lets you instantly magnify the area of the screen in which your mouse pointer is located. The Zoom feature lets you immediately clarify small text or point to detailed areas of the screen, which can be very useful for users with limited sight (as well as being a cool feature for anyone to try out and show off). When Zoom is enabled, press the key combination to zoom in to the configured maximum zoom level. You can keep pressing those keys to zoom in further. Press to zoom out to the minimum zoom level, which is most usefully set to the normal non-zoomed display size .

128. Zoom In

1.	Open the Universal Access Preferences Open the System Preferences application (under the Apple menu); click Universal Access to open the Universal Access Preferences pane. Click the Seeing tab, if it's not already selected.
2.	Turn On Zoom The second large-print item in the window is Zoom . Click the On button to enable Zoom using its default settings. You can now press to zoom in on the mouse pointer's location.
3.	Set the Minimum and Maximum Zoom Level Click the Options button to display a sheet of zoom configuration options. The Maximum Zoom and Minimum Zoom sliders at the top allow you to set how far Zoom should magnify the screen when you press , and to what level it should back off when you press . Experiment with the sliders (pressing the triggering key combinations to test them) until you're happy with the Zoom behavior.
4.	Configure How the Display Moves Use the radio buttons at the bottom of the sheet to specify how you want the screen to react when you move the mouse in a zoomed-in window. Normally, the mouse pointer moves in the display area to reflect what part of the screen you're in (for example, when you're near the bottom-left part of the Mac OS X Desktop, the mouse pointer appears in the lower-left area of the screen when zoomed in). You can set it instead to move the display only when you push the mouse against the side of the zoomed-in screen, or to keep the mouse pointer at the center of the screen at all times. Click Done when you're happy with your Zoom settings.

TIP

The Show preview rectangle when zoomed out check box allows you to see the area of the screen that will be magnified, before you zoom in.

If the Smooth images check box is selected, the zoomed-in screen image will be softened to make graphics appear better and text easier still to read. If it is not selected, each pixel of the normally sized screen is simply made larger, without any smoothing or interpolation. Press (backslash) to toggle between smooth and sharp mode while you're zoomed in.