Make your computer more user friendly and easy to use by learning the Display options in the Accessibility preferences. You will learn how to adjust contrast and color inversion, gray scale settings, mouse and cursor size, and how to make your mouse easier to find.
- [Instructor] In this movie we're going to cover El Capitan's accessibility features for changing the display properties such as mouse size, contrast, coloring options, and more. Changing these properties will assist some users in having a better visual experience with their computers. First, let's open up to the System Preferences from the Apple menu and choose Accessibility. Let's make sure that the first tab display is chosen. From here you will see a series of check boxes to choose from to enable that particular setting. The nice thing is that you will get an immediate preview of the change to see if it is to your liking.
For example, let's go ahead and activate Invert Colors and see what happens. For some users this may provide better viewing. Let's go ahead and disable that. I will choose Use Grayscale and notice how all the color get leaks out of the screen. I'll go ahead and disable that. Choosing Increase Contrast just kind of adds on a little bit of an edge and you can see how there's a darker line around the boxes here and around some of the icons. See that again and you can see that it's also down below on the menu.
I'll go ahead an disable that. Choosing Reduce Transparency you can see the effect on the dock below. This may be helpful to have more opaque colors to help things be seen better for some. Now the Differentiate does not seem to do anything significant in my research and experience so we'll go ahead and skip that. Let's now go down to the next section, Display Contrast. Clicking and dragging on that slide ruler just adjusts the overall contrast of your screen. You can go from normal to maximum. For some users this may be helpful.
Let's now go down below to the Cursor Size. Clicking and dragging on the Cursor slide ruler will make the mouse arrow or cursor that much larger as you drag on it. What's neat is that as you drag it to the right you will see the cursor grow larger and drag it to the left you'll see it grow smaller. And finally, Shake Mouse Pointer to Locate is a great tool for those who may have problems locating the mouse. If you shake the mouse quickly like this you will see it grow. If this is something you prefer not to have active simply just uncheck the box.
As you can see, El Capitan's display features are easy to modify and provide for a rich degree of options for users who require special visual settings.
Technology trainer David Casuto explains basic macOS conventions, and explores how to best resize and manage windows, change the way your mouse behaves, and customize the desktop, including the Dock. Need help finding files and applications? Learn how to search more effectively using Spotlight and Finder. If you have visual or audio impairments, your Mac's accessibility features are a great tool. Find out how to use the display options, zoom, and closed captioning to make macOS more user friendly. Last but not least, David shows how to save time with some helpful keyboard shortcuts. Apple's operating system is a powerful platform; with these tips, you'll find it even easier to use.
- Personalizing your desktop
- Managing windows
- Changing mouse properties
- Searching with Spotlight
- Customizing Finder
- Using accessibility features such as zoom and closed captions
- Using keyboard shortcuts
Skill Level Beginner
What was added in the 01/30/2017 update to this course?
A new video was added that discusses using Siri on a desktop.