Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, El Capitan Edition

Accessibility

The Accessibility panel is designed for people who 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 all these features: www.apple.com/accessibility. Here, though, is an overview of the noteworthiest features, broken down according to the tabs at the left side.

Display

If you have trouble seeing the screen, then, boy, does OS X have features for you.

• Invert colors swaps the colors of the screen, so that text appears white on black—an effect that some people find easier to read. (This option also freaks out many Mac fans who turn it on by mistake. They think the Mac’s expensive monitor has just gone loco. Now you know better.)

• Use grayscale banishes all color from your screen. This is another feature designed to improve text clarity, but it’s also a dandy way to see how a color document will look when printed on a monochrome laser printer.

• Differentiate without color is intended for color-blind people, but it’s fairly pointless. The only thing it affects is the “unavailable” status indicators (like “Away” and “Out to lunch”) in Messages. They’re denoted by red squares instead of circles.

• Increase contrast affects two aspects of the Mac’s design. First, it darkens the lines that form buttons, sliders, and checkboxes on the screen, making them easier to distinguish. Second, it turns on the next checkbox, “Reduce transparency.”

• Reduce transparency ...