Staring intensely at a high-resolution retina display for eight hours a day can cause severe eye strain and crippling headaches, especially if you are working with incredibly small text, complex financial spreadsheets, or highly detailed graphic design elements. You do not need to constantly adjust your global display resolution and mess up your entire desktop layout just to see better. Apple has built an incredibly smooth, hardware-accelerated screen magnification tool directly into macOS, allowing you to instantly zoom in on any specific part of the screen using a simple keyboard shortcut.
How to Enable the Accessibility Zoom Feature
Because this is a powerful system-level accessibility feature, it is disabled by default and buried deep within the settings.
- Click the Apple Logo in the top left corner of your Mac’s menu bar.
- Select System Settings from the drop-down menu.
- In the left-hand navigation sidebar, scroll down and click on Accessibility.
- In the main window, look under the “Vision” section and click on Zoom.
- Toggle the master switch for Use keyboard shortcuts to zoom to the ON position (it will turn blue).
How to Use the Zoom Shortcuts
With the feature activated, your Mac display is now fully elastic and ready to magnify anything your mouse cursor points at.
- Whenever you need to see a small detail clearly, hold down the Option + Command keys simultaneously on your keyboard.
- While holding those two keys, press the “=” (Equals) key to instantly zoom in. You can press the Equals key multiple times to zoom in closer and closer.
- To zoom back out, hold Option + Command and press the “-” (Minus) key.
The true genius of this Apple engineering is that the screen will perfectly track your mouse cursor while zoomed. If you push your mouse to the right edge of the screen, the zoomed perspective will flawlessly glide to the right, allowing you to seamlessly navigate massive documents or complex user interfaces without squinting.