In February, we looked at accessibility, something of a companion topic to January’s focus on health.
Accessibility is usually associated with individuals who have handicaps: vision problems, hearing problems, and mobility issues. But hearing, vision, and mobility problems are things everyone encounters, and your Macintosh, Apple Watch, iPhone, and iPad have technologies that help you deal with temporary as well as more permanent afflictions.
One of the most basic is changing the size of items displayed on your Mac, iPhone, Watch, or iPad.
You can, for example, vary the size of text,
from small, in instances where you want a lot of stuff on the screen at once, to
normal, for comfortable reading
to large, for reading at a distance
to extra large, for posters or shouting.
You can also change other attributes how information is displayed, depending on the program and context
Somethimes, you can change the background color on the screen,
or tint the screen and text to get rid of blue colors late at night, to help you sleep.
Your iPhone, iPad, and Mac can also speak to you, and you can speak to them.
Unfortunately, Zoom seems to have disabled many of these features, partly because the changes are intended for the user sitting at their own computer, and not for the screens of viewers. Additionally, the demo computer’s screen was being mirrored on a TV, and some of the accessibility features were not available, as the TV was a remote device, not subject to the whims of the computer.
What could not be shown: changing the resolution of the screen. While this was a Macintosh screen, you can do similar things on an iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch.
This was a screen on the computer. The Displays pane (System Settings > Displays in Ventura) is set at Larger Text,
macOS Ventura System Settings > Displayed set at Larger Text
In this image, the Displays pane (System Settings > Displays in Ventura) is set at the second level, to show more of the screen,
macOS Ventura System Settings > Displays set to show more screen.
In this image, the Displays pane (System Settings > Displays in Ventura) is set at the default level, halfway between Large Text and More Space.
macOS Ventura System Settings > Displays set to the middle, default setting.
In this image, the Displays pane (System Settings > Displays in Ventura) is set to show more of the screen.
macOS Ventura System Settings > Displays set to show more of the screen.
In the final image, the Displays pane (System Settings > Displays in Ventura) is set to show the maximum amount of screen space.
macOS Ventura System Settings > Displays set to show the maximum amount of screen space.
You can easily change the screen resolution at any time. Writing a memo? Set to show larger text. Sorting photos? Set to show more of the screen. You don’t need to strain your eyes to read or write, nor spend endless amounts of time scrolling through lists of photos when it is a simple matter to show more photos at once. Designing a poster? Set to maximum screen size, then set it for larger text to work on fine details.
It was also difficult to demonstrate many of the things you can do with Siri because the Mac is set up to serve the person at the keyboard, and not people in remote locations. In response to one question concerning dictation of messages and documents on the Mac, please see Apple’s online guidance:
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/use-dictation-mh40584/mac
A video of the meeting, including the Question and Answer session, is shown below. Closed captioning was not turned on, so there is no transcript.