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 preferences. In System Preferences, Accessibility preferences are now organized around topics of vision, hearing, and motor, making it simpler to find what you’re looking for.
Do it all with Voice Control. You can control your Mac with just your voice. All audio processing for Voice Control happens on-device, so your personal data is kept private.
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.
You can add custom words to help Voice Control recognize the words you commonly use. Choose System Preferences > Accessibility, select Voice Control, then click Vocabulary and add the words you want. To customize commands in the Voice Control preferences page, click Commands, then select to keep default commands, or add new ones.
Note: The dictation accuracy improvements are for US English only.
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 cursor 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 cursor. 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.
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.
Color enhancements. If you have a color vision deficiency, you can adjust your Mac display colors using new color filter options. It’s easy to toggle this preference on or off to quickly differentiate a color using the Accessibility Options panel, which you can access by pressing Command-Option-F5.
Learn more. See Use accessibility features on Mac in the macOS User Guide.