Understanding Universal Access

The Universal Access pane is where you can make your Mac more accessible to users of your Mac who have various physical or mental challenges. However, even if you don't have such challenges or don't support other users who do, you can use the Universal Access tools to make your Mac better suited to the way in which you like to work. For example, using the Zoom feature, you can zoom using the same keyboard shortcut in any application.

Setting up Universal Access involves configuring any or all of the following areas:

• Seeing Using the Seeing controls, you can configure visual aspects of your system. You can use VoiceOver to have your Mac speak interface elements and you can use zoom to increase the size of items on the screen. You can change the display to be white on a black background or grayscale. You can also configure the display's contrast.

• Hearing The Hearing controls enable you to set the screen to flash when the alert sound plays.

• Keyboard Using the Keyboard controls, you can configure Sticky Keys that enable users to choose key combinations by typing only one key at a time. You can also provide assistance to users who have difficulty with initial or repeated keystrokes with the Slow Keys feature. Slow Keys enables you to set a delay for the time between when a key is pressed and when the input is accepted by the system.

• Mouse The Mouse controls enable you to control the mouse by using the numeric pad on the keyboard and to control the size of the cursor that appears on screen.

NOTE

On mobile Macs, the Mouse controls are the Mouse & Trackpad controls.

While not technically part of the Universal Access configuration tools, you can also use your Mac's Speech Recognition and Text to Speech capabilities to add audio elements to the interface.