Accessibility on your Mac
Your Mac, iOS devices, and iPadOS devices include powerful tools to make Apple product features available and easy to use by all. There are four main accessibility focus areas for your Mac. Click a link to learn more about the features for each area:
For comprehensive details about Accessibility support in Apple products, go to Accessibility.
Accessibility settings. In System Settings, Accessibility settings are organized around topics of vision, hearing, and motor, making it simpler to find what you’re looking for.
Live Captions (Beta). Add real-time captions for conversations, audio, and video. Not available in all languages, countries, or regions. See Use Live Captions in the macOS User Guide.
Do it all with Voice Control. You can control your Mac with just your voice. All audio processing for Voice Control happens on your Mac, so your personal data is kept private. See Control your Mac and apps using Voice Control in the macOS User Guide.
Important: Mac mini doesn’t have a built-in microphone, so you must connect an external microphone (sold separately) in order to use Voice Control.
Accurate dictation. If you can’t type by hand, accurate dictation is essential for communication. Voice Control brings the latest advances in machine learning for speech-to-text transcription.
Dictate custom spellings letter by letter. You can also add custom words to help Voice Control recognize the words you commonly use. Choose System Settings > Accessibility, select Voice Control, click Vocabulary, then add the words you want. To customize commands in the Voice Control settings page, click Commands, then select to keep default commands or add new ones.
Note: The dictation accuracy improvements are for these languages: English (US, UK, India, Australia), Mandarin Chinese (China mainland), Cantonese (Hong Kong), Japanese (Japan), Spanish (Mexico, Latin America, Spain), French (France), and German (Germany).
Rich text editing. Rich text editing commands in Voice Control let you quickly make corrections and move on to expressing your next idea. You can replace one phrase with another, quickly position the pointer to make edits, and select text with precision. Try saying “Replace ‘John will be there soon’ with ‘John just arrived’.” When you correct words, word and emoji suggestions help you quickly select what you want.
Comprehensive navigation. Use voice commands to open and interact with apps. To click an item, just say its accessibility label name. You can also say “show numbers” to show a number label next to each clickable item, then say a number to click. If you need to touch a part of the screen without a control, you can say “show grid” to superimpose a grid on your screen and do things like click, zoom, drag, and more.
Hover and zoom. Use Hover Text to display high-resolution text for screen items under your pointer. Press Command while hovering over text with the pointer, and a window with zoomed text appears on your screen.
Zoom Display lets you keep one monitor zoomed in tightly and another at its standard resolution. View the same screen up close and at a distance simultaneously.
Make an easy-to-see custom pointer. Customize the outline and fill color of the mouse pointer so it’s easier to recognize when it moves or changes to an insertion point, crosshair, hand, or other shape.
Improved keyboard access. An expanded set of keyboard shortcuts allows you to control everything on your Mac with a keyboard—no mouse or trackpad required.
Use VoiceOver, the built-in screen reader. VoiceOver describes aloud what appears on the screen and speaks the text in documents, webpages, and windows. Using VoiceOver, you control your Mac with the keyboard or trackpad gestures, or connect a refreshable braille display to use with VoiceOver. To customize VoiceOver, use VoiceOver Utility. See VoiceOver User Guide.
Siri: Say something like:
“Turn VoiceOver on.”
“Turn VoiceOver off.”
Use Siri for VoiceOver. If you prefer the natural voice of Siri, you can choose to use Siri for VoiceOver or Speech. Simplified keyboard navigation requires less drilling into unique focus groups—making it even easier to navigate with VoiceOver. You can also store custom punctation marks in iCloud, and choose from International Braille tables. And if you’re a developer, VoiceOver now reads aloud line numbers, break points, warnings, and errors in the Xcode text editor.
VoiceOver image descriptions. Using Markup in Preview or Quick Look, you can add alternative image descriptions that can be read by VoiceOver. Image descriptions persist even when shared and can be read by a range of supported apps on iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
VoiceOver PDF signature descriptions. Add custom descriptions to your PDF signatures so you can identify them quickly and choose the right one.
Color enhancements. If you have a color vision deficiency, you can adjust your Mac display colors using color filter options. It’s easy to toggle this setting on or off to quickly differentiate a color using the Accessibility Options settings, which you can access by pressing Option-Command-F5.
Background sounds. Mask unwanted environmental noise and minimize distractions with calming sounds like ocean or rain.
Customize your Memoji. Add cochlear implants, oxygen tubes, and a soft helmet for headwear to your Memoji. See Messages to learn about creating your Memoji.
Learn more. See Get started with accessibility features on Mac in the macOS User Guide.