macOS Sierra: The Missing Manual

Accessibility

The Accessibility panel, newly overhauled in Sierra, is designed for people who, for example, type with one hand, find it difficult to use a mouse, or have trouble seeing or hearing.

Accessibility is a huge focus for Apple. In fact, there’s a whole Apple website dedicated to explaining these controls: www.apple.com/accessibility. Here, though, is an overview of the noteworthiest features, broken down according to the tabs at the left side.

General

Apple assumes that many of the Accessibility features are things you’ll want to turn on and off on the fly, as you need them. So in macOS Sierra, there’s a keyboard shortcut that pulls up a dashboard of Accessibility features and their on/off checkboxes (Figure 10-4): Option--F5.

The purpose of this dashboard (the General tab) is to choose which checkboxes you want to appear on that dashboard. Any checkboxes you turn off here won’t appear in the panel shown in Figure 10-4.

Figure 10-4. With a quick tap of Option--F5, you can summon this panel of on/off switches for Accessibility features.

VoiceOver

The Mac has always been able to read stuff on the screen out loud. But Apple has taken this feature light-years further, turning it into a ...